> Some people cannot think clearly through a problem if you use outdated or offensive language. Nobody is inferior to anyone else? So a person who kills children and saves the lives of children are morally equal?
> There’s a psychiatric phenomenon called “moral dumbfounding.” It manifests when you think something is evil or disgusting, and you want to say it’s immoral, but you can’t think of a reason why it’s immoral. So, you end up saying it just is. I was, I think, seven at the time my mother ranked a dog above a human being, but I recognise in the recollection of her comment my first experience of moral dumbfounding. How could a dog be worth more than a child, even a stupid one who sat, dough-like, at his desk day-after-day, unable to write his name?
The whole thing seems totally incoherent; assuming that a useless vegetable is more valuable than a useful animal because the vegetable is human and the animal isn't immediately implies that a murderer is more valuable than a useful animal for the same reason. And that implies that imprisoning murderers is something you shouldn't do. We imprison them 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 they have negative value; we have guide dogs because they have positive value. It's not at all difficult to draw the comparison.
A large part of the problem with the pragmatic remarks is that the people who make them tend not to be very nice people, and tend to treat other people as inferior to themselves, never mind if the other person is retarded or not.
So the kind of person (and it may not be Ms. Dale's mother in practice) who makes remarks like "a good sheep dog is better than that downie" is not alone more likely to mistreat the retard, they're more likely to mistreat all others around them since the most valuable person in the entire world is they themselves.
That's what gets the eugenicists and the pragmatists a bad name.
> So the kind of person (and it may not be Ms. Dale's mother in practice) who makes remarks like "a good sheep dog is better than that downie" is not alone more likely to mistreat the retard, they're more likely to mistreat all others around them since the most valuable person in the entire world is they themselves.
This is a real issue. But it's not fundamental to the question at hand, or to any of the other questions where it comes up.
I've seen a literary villain characterized by saying that as a boy he enjoyed pulling the wings off of flies. (I think this was in The 13 Clocks, but I can't guarantee that.) It's easy to draw analogies to more undesirable tastes and behaviors, but I will argue that this really shouldn't be done.
One thing that I, personally, did as a boy was incinerate ants with a magnifying glass. This seems fairly well equivalent to pulling the wings off of flies; I'm devoting special effort to killing them in a particularly painful fashion.
Of course the big difference is that my activity was a popular pastime actively suggested by local culture, which means there was no inference to draw about my personality.
And everyone endorses 𝘴𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 flies. The only problem with a boy doing that is that it dirties his hands while making the world better for everyone else.
The only reason that the stigmatized behavior is informative as to undesirable personality traits is specifically that the behavior is stigmatized. You can say the same thing about wearing sneakers instead of dress shoes, or wearing a bikini instead of a burka, and people do. But it's very rare for Westerners to argue that it's 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 to stigmatize those behaviors!
> So the kind of person (and it may not be Ms. Dale's mother in practice) who makes remarks like "a good sheep dog is better than that downie" is not alone more likely to mistreat the retard, they're more likely to mistreat all others around them
I don't think this can explain Helen Dale's reaction, since she would have been familiar with her own mother and the remark seems totally justified. (If you read the essay, Dale's mother makes it after the retarded child's father kills the dog.)
Poor phrasing; swatting flies contradicts Buddhist doctrine, but the vast majority of Buddhists don't care. They endorse swatting flies just like everyone else.
I don't know about most Buddhist b/c that's a vast field, but the Tibetan Buddhist communities I've known (in the EU) all seemed to push the point enough to count as not endorsing killing insects, and I remember most of the people avoiding it most of the time, and being apologetic when they resorted to it. I've also personally seen this kind of respect for life in the East, among Nepalis especially. Not that everyone would refrain, but there was a level of shared acknowledgment that they should.
Having read the essay, I have no problem with classifying Mrs. Dale as a stupid bitch who would, if given the ability, have no problem drawing up little lists of who should and should not be sent off to the camps.
It was ordinary normal Germans who did what we are all tip-toeing around by calling "Nazi eugenics". The Mrs. Dales of the world, with their charitable activities, would have been very happy to go along with "isn't it time to put this generation out of their misery?"
A dog is not worth more than a human, no matter how valuable the dog or how retarded the human. If it had been the father of a 'normal' child who killed the dog by accident, would she have made the same remark? And yet the end result would have been the same: a valuable working dog killed by a careless driver. The fact that this particular remark leapt to her lips so readily demonstrates what she really thought of the genetically inferior, and it wasn't Scott's kindly conclusion.
EDIT: Let me expand on this, to be clear. If Mrs. Dale had said "The dog was worth more than that damn fool" about the man hitting it with the car, then I'd have no objections. That's a normal thing to say.
But the child, so far as I can see, had nothing to do with the accident. They didn't kill the dog, and unless they were in the car and grabbed the steering wheel, they weren't responsible for it. So the fact that Mrs. Dale immediately invoked "the dog was more valuable than the child" means that mentally she had categorised that family as "the family with the retard" and clearly had slotted them into a place of lower worth - be that genetically inferior or less moral worth.
Imagine, as I said, this was the father of a normal child. What would you then think if Mrs. Dale made the remark about the value of the child versus the dog? Imagine a child had run out into the road - children do this - and the driver swerved to avoid hitting them, went up on the footpath, and killed the guide dog.
If Mrs. Dale said "the dog was more valuable than the child", wouldn't you wonder about her set of values? What would you think if she said yes, the driver should have chosen to hit the child and not the dog? If she explained that "Any kid stupid enough to run out into the road is only going to be a burden on society, it would have been better if the driver hit the idiot and took it out of the way before it could grow up and breed more fools", would you be pleased or appalled at such objective consideration of societal contribution?
“I cope with the awareness that I'm genetically/biologically inferior to many people by just reframing it as my playing life on hard mode, and so therefore instead of being shameful it becomes vaguely commendable for me to put up with my defectiveness.”
Neat. This is most modern version of the Stoic challenge where the gods throw obstacles in front of us to test our mettle and improve us.
I also resonate with your thinking about living as the mirror.
"Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music."
Does anyone else other than me have the opposite experience? When I'm sad, I like music that cheers me up.
When I'm sad, I listen to happy music to cheer up. When I'm happy, I listen to happy music because it's fun. I am a simple creature with simple tastes.
Same with me as with NormalAnomaly. I do not consume sad music, novels, films, or anything else that is depressing in some way — I like pleasure and happiness.
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(Strangely, the unrestricted — some might even say /excessive/ — pursuit of unalloyed euphoria and pleasure has brought me sadness more than once.
Maybe everyone was right when they said all that stuff. You know, about like... having cake and eating it too, the value of hard work, the importance of loyalty and self-sacrifice, the dangers of heroin, blah blah blah all the other nonsense and etc.)
Modern publishing seems obsessed with a narrow spectrum of fairly well-trodden and quite unhappy-making themes, and I'd love a change. I solemnly promise to read them responsibly and not seek unalloyed euphoria...
Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries. They’re murder mysteries, but the victims aren’t characters you know, and her detective and the world he lives in are delightful.
All of Jane Austen....incredibly sophisticated humor, wry tongue-in-cheek social commentary, very well developed characters (even many of the minor characters), happy endings, bad guys get some gentle form of comeuppance, engaging dialogue, and if you find a good reader (Librevox, a free book app and worth the pittance for an ad free version, has two great readers Karen Savage, and Elizabeth Klett) excellent audio books to listen to over and over.
Also, almost all of Anthony Trollope. I also like most of Gordon R. Dickson, and *of course* Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.
No! Screw responsibility! If *we* don't seek to sup the pure shining sea of pleasure dry — if WE do not wield the glorious Brand of Unmitigated Hedonism — /then who will?!/
To that end, oh boy, I have a /lot/ of recommendations. It would help to know how you felt about historical fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy, though; that's mostly what I read, in fiction. Also, male readers generally tend to enjoy my recommendations in the genre "military sci-fi", but no woman — as of yet — has ever managed to even finish one of the things, heh... :'(
I enjoy all of the above, with the (apparently predictable) exclusion of military SF (with the exception of Heinlein, which I did enjoy! - but that is going back a fair ways). However if the characterisation is strong enough, I would be willing to give even military SF a go; I'm just not that interested in theoretical military strategising though - or explosions for explosions' sake.
Fantasy is a mixed bag; a lot of modern fantasy is too swords and sorcerers for me, but fantasy novels that are purely fantastical are often excellent - Bridge of Birds comes to mind.
Robin McKinley has a lot of happy stuff, but also some bittersweet, but that doesn't sound like as much of a problem?
If you're in the mood for swashbuckling adventure in the spirit of Dumas, try "The Phoenix Guards" by Steven Brust. (The proper way to read it is giggling all the way through.)
I hate, hate, hate bittersweet. To me, it is purely bitter, and all the worse for it because it tricks you for a bit into thinking it's /actually/ sweet.
If you're into fantasy, I'd say Pratchett has some really happy ones. "Going Postal", "Thud!" come to mind. (My favorite one, "Night Watch", is absolutely depressing, but I'd say that's untypical.) I highly recommend these books if you haven't read them - perhaps look up some quotes if you'd like to be convinced.
Since everyone's giving you SF and fantasy, I'll offer something else: Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum-Bun: A Novel without a Moral. It's a Harlem Renaissance novel with a happy ending.
The Golden Age of the Solar Clippers series by Nathan Lowell are a light, low-action (detractors complain of boredom) series about the protagonist working his way up through the ranks as a starship crew member, and making increasing amounts of money as he develops a nose for a good trade.
The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (and sequels) is about the protagonist, personal secretary to the emperor, developing a friendship with same as he institutes a series of government reforms.
Rachel Numeier's Tuyo series isn't all that happy—the villains put our protagonists through great trials—but they generally *end* happily, and she's written about how she likes her protagonists to be good-hearted people doing their best, which I feel characterizes the series well. (I also thought the prose was very nice).
I also like pleasure and happiness but I consume "sad" things because they often create a more interesting emotional state than "happy" things. Or at least how I think of it, "happy" is good but a bit like sugar - can be saccharine/cloying.
If I'm being very self-aware I would have to admit I'm usually doing this for essentially hedonistic motivations, makes me feel "deep", "more alive", but ultimately still just some kind of high I'm chasing
A lot of people say this, but to me it's like saying "I like eating garbage, because it has more complex flavor than 'good' food." Like... yeah, maybe, maybe not, but I still don't want it!
Sometimes I want to be sad, in a way that I'd endorse (i.e. at "reflective equilibrium"). Call it catharsis. For example, at funerals, I don't want to distract myself from the sadness the whole time, that defeats the purpose of a funeral. Or if I'm angry and I decide screaming into a pillow will help.
When it's not one of those situations, I try to do things that will cheer me up. That's obviously the right thing to do.
But then again, that's a strategy that I learned at a point in my life, and which I must remember and choose to apply. Sometimes it comes naturally, yes, but sometimes it's my abstract decision-making process overriding my natural instincts. Which implies that my natural instinct is to mope.
I mean, if you need happy music to make yourself stop being sad, doesn't that imply that your natural behavior would be to keep being sad? Why? Why not just, like, stop? Clearly you are in a stable equilibrium of sadness, and require an external stimulus to stop. Doesn't that imply that you too have a tendency to mope? You just are good at not letting your music choices be influenced by your moping tendency
There are external drivers and then there are internal drivers. If you listen to happy music, then when memories of music show up, they'll tend to be happy, and drive your emotions in that direction.
FWIW, funerals being solemn and sad is a cultural choice. In my particular subculture it is preferred that they be memories of happy experiences being recalled, including the happy emotions. I wouldn't insist on being happy at a solemn funeral, but that's not what I had for my wife. I may be sad she's no longer with me, but the memories of her are happy.
My father explicitly said "I don't want a funeral, I want a party," and that's what he got; all his friends got together again and drank and laughed and listened to loud music and had a good time.
My thinking is honestly that I'm pretty good at avoiding sadness, but it would just feel weird if my grandmother died and I never cried about it. A funeral seems like the right time to wallow in sorrow, just for a small part of it, so that in the future I can know that I did.
My memories of the person are mostly happy with a tinge of sadness, and the funeral is mostly happy with a tinge of sadness, but the sadness did get a chance to stand alone for a few minutes so I know for sure what's in there.
I prefer not to weep or feel sadness even at funerals and all. Like, I get your rationale; and I think most would agree with you, immediately or upon reflection — but...
Well, I have trained myself to have a sort of "flinch response" to thinking too closely about things, such as (e.g.): "remember that time you found your best friend's dead body and realized that he died waiting for you and this was possibly a cry for help that failed because you didn't come when you said you were going to?"
shit actually I'm getting too close to really thinking about it right now. just move fast enough you don't let yourself /feel/, and it's usually okay to even appear to be sadly discussing it IRL for a bit — sort of just let your thoughts skim off the surface of your brain, if you know what I mean; focus on your words as if entirely meaningless symbols elicited by the curious natives of this planet at their quaint "fyuu-nurgal" or whatever it's called —
— okay, we're good now. See, very doable; sure, many people say that someday I will have to "pay the piper" when I can no longer stop my thought-tongue from probing the mental "dry socket of loss" (where once the tooth of love had masticated away upon the donuts of happiness, or... something)...
...but that's the beauty of this trick: when you finally fail in your vigilance, or it just really hits you due to some chance event¹ or comment, /if all went according to plan/ it has been so long that it is no longer anything like the torment it once could've been! Just a dull, distant ache flavored with a hint of emptiness!
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>Doesn't that imply that you too have a tendency to mope?<
Yes and no. Certainly, I am prone to feeling sadness and other bad things, moreso than most I think — but that's unrelated to the music thing. That is, "I tend to be easy prey to sadness" doesn't mean I *want* to be, and I can honestly say that I have never, ever (not once in my life AFAIK) wanted to listen to a sad song or watch a sad film. It takes no discipline or conscious "hmm I am not letting this influence me" to avoid them, heh.
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¹: (like when I found a little letter my ex-wife had written me before she left; yeah... in that case actually this didn't work at all and I can feel my eyes starting to sting a bit already)
I have had bad experiences with that approach. Took me 8 years to realize I was gay. In retrospect, I really wish I was worse at compartmentalizing.
The thing is, being sad isn't actually bad, in itself. It's just an emotional experience that we choose to dislike. The approach I've found as the alternative is letting myself think about the bad shit as much as I can muster while still maintaining that detached "bad shit happens to everyone" perspective. Similar to what you're describing, but with an eye towards reaching true numbness as fast as possible through repeated exposure and practice.
The advantage is 1) you don't want to leave little emotional landmines scattered around your brain, and 2) sometimes the bad memories have useful information in or near them, information that you'd be better off having access to.
As another example of (2), I got in a really bad car accident that was partly my fault. If I didn't think about it, I can't even work towards becoming a better, safer driver because doing so means acknowledging my guilt. Of course being overwhelmed by it doesn't help either. The goal is "this is ok, but still bad, but still ok."
That's a good point; your approach reminds me of the one advocated in a lot of Buddhist sources (though I can't say what *modern* Buddhist writers tend to advocate — I only read the traditional texts, after nearly dismissing the entire program due to starting off with a milquetoast modern book on the religion... bleh!).
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— and: "little emotional landmines scattered around your brain" is a hilarious, but sometimes-unfortunately-accurate, way to describe it, heh.
[WARNING: merely "thinking out loud" for the rest of this; it's a bunch of rambling nonsense; I'm just sunk-cost-fallacy–ing myself into leaving it in — the reader can still save themselves, however! Fly, you fool!—]
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I have, after ex-wife left due to my terrible mistakes, gone all-in on the "let's paper over it and then never wander near that area again" strat (whereas, before, I still gave some consideration to the Landmine Dilemma).
Probably this is largely due to a feeling of "why bother improving now, it's too late"; like, were this a game, I would have quit and reloaded long ago — this wasn't how it was supposed to go! I don't wanna play this save any more!
...unfortunately, it appears that I am unable to find the "load game" menu.
(and, as rudderless and bereft as I feel now, four years or so on, I suppose it's sort of a waste to destroy myself over it — plus, she seems to be pretty worried and upset over my obvious deterioration, heh. so I can't just /totally/ give up.)
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thing is — per everything else in my life — I went pretty hard on the whole "it's Us, not Me, forever and always, now" thing.
We met when I was 18, and we were together 24/7 from like... week two or three up till I turned 30; and it was just *set in stone*, for me, that... like... it's US. That is how it will be.
You know what I mean? There is no consideration of alternatives — may as well mentally ready one's self to live as a collaborator in the Lizardmen Conquest of something, right, or prepare emotionally for the imminent discovery that the Earth actually IS just the shell of the Great Turtle.
Not sure I'm explaining it well (...and hold on, is this even relevant? welp, too late now—).
Just: that was the basis for all of it... alllll of it.
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Wouldn't be so hard to let go & start trying to deal with life on more standard terms, I think, if it were that SHE had had the bad taste to change her mind about me, or something, heh...
...but to have it be /my own damn fault/—
—and not even like a CHOICE, not like I DECIDED "hey I wanna be with this other chick more than you"(¹)— in fact, quite the opposite!
too little, too late; but the opposite, in truth.
Just... wish I had finally made my decision clear a little (or a lot) earlier.
Chose the right thing — but first, erred thrice;
she forgave and forgave me — but twice.
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(¹: though you can say that my actions did indeed communicate that... but it wasn't MEANT to go like that and
aargh.)
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Not to absolve myself of the error, not at all. It is no credit to me to compound selfishness and disloyalty with rank obliviousness and churlish stupidity.
No, it's just that— even when I did the bad thing, I *did not understand*... not up until the moment she found out, and began to scream and sob these great choking heaving sobs and those ragged, agonized screams... like her heart was being ripped out of her chest, like her entire world was being ripped apart.
because of me. the person I loved! the person who *counted on me!* and not even for something I actually wanted above our marriage— how fucking /stupid./
so... that is when I started thinking "uh oh, maybe... maybe this was a much worse mistake than I realized.
"maybe... might be... I forgot that inner thoughts and feelings are not the same as expressed love and loyalty; and that lack of the latter easily overcomes claims of the former."
oops.
will never forget it. never, never, never. "you were my special person. why...? /why,/ William?"
because I'm a piece of shit that's why lol. see, now my eyes are doing the thing with the saline discharge. no good can come of considering these things I was right damn it
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TL;DR:
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....so: my thought has been:
"alright, so you struggled with the tendency to excess, and to ignore/avoid/compartmentalize 'human stuff', your whole life;
& you only tried to be different because someone else counted on you;
"St. James Infirmary" is one of my favorite songs. "Feeling Good" is also a favorite, which I think goes to show that it's not really the lyrics, or at least not how you read them on the page.
I find that some sad music can bring a pleasant feeling of peacefulness that beats feeling anxious or overly wound up.
For me, no. I have never once in my life liked a sad song, AFAICR, and for all but a very few the feeling of being forced to listen to them anyway is *intensely* unpleasant... (Or — "intensely" relative to other such responses to stimuli, at least.).
The few exceptions — "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", say; "Laugh Laugh" by... I forgot their name whoops — I can feel some sort of beauty in... but it is still outweighed by the suffocating "GET THESE LEAD WEIGHTS OFF OF MY FIGURATIVE MUSICO-EMOTIONAL LIMBS"–feeling, heh.
Same for sad films. Same for—oh, a lot of things, actually...
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...like, a lot of people say they wouldn't wirehead themselves; I would in an instant.
Many don't wish to lose their unpleasant emotions and sensations; I would excise the capacity from myself in a heartbeat (assuming it could be done without making me a monster or dead, heh).
It's even like this with, say, food, or hobbies: most indicate they have learned to "appreciate" more "complex flavors" — I say they've learned to trick themselves into liking bitter shit (grapefruits... [shudder]); most seem to have a certain limit, like "I don't wish to eat more than a small, reasonable serving of this ice-cream, thank you 🙂"...
...I am only stopped from eating the entire tub if I'm simply already mostly full / have learned to only buy little half-pints at a time...
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...Or, when my friends and I / ex-wife and I would get into something, some new hobby or book series or game, there would inevitably come a point at which they'd say: "hey, we've been spending every waking moment doing [thing] for [hours/days/weeks]... let's do something else...?"
It's never me, I noticed, even as a kid!
Same way I'd always be the last one up, the final one of us still agitating to acquire more LSD/cocaine/hookers, when everyone else had long-since called it quits...
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(...well, the hookers part is a joke, okay! I swear–)
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I suppose I'd call it something like... some lack of complexity in my "soul"?
A tendency to excess, combined with my manufacturer not /quite/ managing to capture the exact "human" response in edge-cases like "sometimes humans want to feel other than unalloyed joy" or "sometimes humans want to stop doing a pleasurable thing because of 'moderation' or something I guess", etc...?
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I dunno... my mother and ex-wife always claimed I was missing something, heh. The former actually told the latter not to marry me; when she left she said "I see why your mother said that now — I think you love me as best as you can love anything, and you try to be a human as best as you're able... but there's definitely something different, there."
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(But she also said: "But I loved you for it, William. Why did you do this to us?"
Uh oh. I'm gonna ruin the whole thing by crying just like a regular boy now.)
When I'm sad, the last thing I want to do is indulge in even more sadness. I love a good war movie but I'm not going anywhere near an All's Quiet or Schindler's List unless I'm in a pretty good mood. And sad music is even worse!
I don't like *sad* music per se, but I tend to prefer *calmer*, *lower energy* music. Maybe that's because it makes me devote less energy to finding ways to make myself sadder, which is generally the loop my head is stuck in when I'm very sad.
There are huge social benefits to it, especially if your peer group is progressive and you present as female or some other left-coded identity (LGBTQ, BIPOC, etc.).
1. You gain social reinforcement and support. People will feel bad for you and want to help you.
2. If you can blame someone else for it, you can send your peer group after *them*, so it can be used in social battles.
3. It's an identity, sort of. You now gain a new left-coded 'badge' (see 1. above) you can use in these sorts of struggles ("As a person with mental health issues...")
The downside, of course, is that you get depressed. So the optimal strategy would be to say you're depressed but not actually be depressed, i.e. fake it. But people are often pretty good at detecting that offline. So it's more effective to actually get depressed easily...
...particularly if you don't have any other left-coded 'badges'. (Yes, that means it's most likely to happen to wealthy women with no other problems, as you can see if you read the NYT...remember Victorian neurasthenia? Fashionable TB?)
Does that really have much explanatory power? You could tell a similar story about opioid addicts or incels. Oh, they’re just leaning into a status to score social points!
You could even say the same about military veterans. They get literal badges for it.
I think you’re reading too much into a normal human interaction.
I don't think people get depressed for the social status. The original statement was about being "tricked" into feeling depressed, i.e. already feeling somewhat depressed and seeking it out further or else identifying publicly as depressed. It absolutely happens for a variety of reasons internal and external, most outside of the person's conscious control.
Opioid addicts I don't agree with, but incels--there is a certain camaraderie in it (if only online), and a guy who can't get laid is going to try to find other people to commiserate with and agitate with. And admittedly the presence of incels as an organized group does seem to have frightened some of the powers that be into dialing back their anti-male rhetoric, as they realize "men are bad" 24/7 isn't a winning strategy, at least ahead of an election. How much it's going to change things IRL is anyone's guess.
There's a piece missing which isn't exactly about seeing oneself as a victim. There's also seeing other people as victims. Nothing is ever good enough and everything is an emergency.
I think it's an accidental result of trying to get things right.
If the seminal Pixar film Inside Out is to be believed, depression is a numbing experience, which can be superficially better than un-numbed sadness, although less healthy than just experiencing the sadness in the long run.
From the outside, the entirety of therapy culture looks like people paying to be tricked into believing or feeling something. I suppose if you tricked yourself IN to it, maybe you can trick yourself OUT, but I remain baffled that any of this works on people who are self-aware and had a genuine basis for arriving at the conclusion or mental state that prompted their distress. When you leave the magic show, you don't keep believing in magic even if you let yourself be tricked.
it seems we need some reasonable unreasonableness (default optimism and naivety, prosocial trust), and depression is usually the lack of this. so therapy (for example behavior activation, CBT) is focusing on this
of course usually people have plenty of real shit from home/school/work that they are blind to, which leads them to repeatedly get into distressing situations, so after some work on skills (boundaries, empathy, usual self-management coaching stuff) the activated behaviors have a better chance of leading to better than expected outcomes, which then overall with the cognitive reframing from CBT ought to instill a sustainable positive bias
“(as the old saying goes, everyone has someone who’s better than them and someone who’s worse than them, with two exceptions. And any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.)”
This is false if the world is infinite :). Aside from the pedantry, great article!
"In the legend, a poor stone-cutter craves to become a rich man, then a prince; his wishes are granted in turn by a mountain spirit. He then enviously desires to become the sun, impervious to heat; then clouds, undaunted by the sun; then the mountain, which withstands the rain which falls from the clouds. But when a stone-cutter starts chipping away at him, he wants to revert to being a man, and comes to the realization that he is satisfied with his station in life as a humble stone-cutter."
As a third possibility, the set of souls is not well-ordered, because the question of which of two people is more awesome is, objectively and in the fully general case, undecidable. "Treat as equal until proven otherwise, and don't go *trying* to prove otherwise without a damn good reason" could then be necessary as a patch to prevent infinite loops or other wasteful errors.
Note that this can still be true even if many such comparisons are easy to resolve.
It's possible for an infinite world to contain only finitely many people, as seems overwhelmingly likely to be true of ours. Even if *the world* is infinite, only finitely many people have yet been born and there is some reason to suspect only finitely many people will be.
I don't think that's likely to be true of ours, but granted, that's theoretically possible. If the world is infinite in size, then infinite people will have been born.
Only finitely many people have been born *that we know of*. Maybe more people were born beyond the edge of the observable universe. If the universe is infinite, and there's not some cosmic law ensuring humanity (or any other species that qualifies as people) only evolve a finite number of times, we'd expect an infinite number of people.
Now, I know the obvious response to this is that with an infinite number of people, we'd expect infinitely many perfect people to exist, but I disagree. After all, we're still only talking about countably infinite people, but if we can express how good a person is as a real number, there's uncountably many values for how good they can possibly be. And that's even assuming it's possible. Maybe the set of values for how good you can be is an open set, and thus someone could be arbitrarily close to perfect, but not actually perfect, in much the same way that a massive object can travel arbitrarily close to the speed of light, but not at the speed of light.
Also, he was just making a simple joke and you're taking it too seriously. Though not nearly as seriously as I just took it. Taking things too seriously is fun. :)
The world contains only so many atoms, which keep getting recycled (and a very few get lost, like helium, and a very few are gained, like meteors). A finite number of atoms means a finite number of combinations of them. Ergo, a finite number of people can exist on Earth.
If some combination of atoms happens to come together in the same configuration twice, is it the same person?
It's definitely false, as it assume a world in a uniform state. It is almost always true that whether one person is better than another depends on the environment they are situated within. That there exist exceptional cases (e.g. cystic fibrosis) and borderline cases (e.g. sickle cell) does not render that general statement false.
OTOH, this almost always means that a blanket statement "person A is genetically inferior to person B" is an overgeneralization, as it is assuming an unstated environment. The idea of the existence of a total-ordering of genetic quality is an error. (One example of the is the existence of multiple species.)
Assuming humans aren't really apples to apples, large numbers of people are incomparable. This is usually true in practice; you may compare yourself to a few (generally similar) people, but not to everyone.
Unfortunately, even if a system where only one person is allowed to feel good about themselves is bad, it's not really "up to us" to decide that system. Reminds me of the peerlessness of the greeks
You and Lance have equal moral value in the sense that utilitarianism says that the same weight should be given to each of your preferences. If you and Lance were the only humans (so the ability to improve the lives of others was irrelevant), and one of you had to die, utilitarianism would either be agnostic or decide based on something like who wanted to keep living more.
But what if Lance's preferences are more strongly held? This gets much more extreme with hedonistic utilitarianism. If what matters is happiness, then someone's moral value is proportional to how happy they are, and anyone sad has negative moral value.
Also, does Scott have more moral value than a cow? If not every animal has equal moral value, we'd expect not every human would have quite equal moral value either. Maybe Lance has more brain cells and is more sentient or however that works.
Their preferences would still each be accorded equal weight, in the same way that your money and my money count the same per $, even though we might possess or bid differing amounts of money.
The point with hedonic utilitarianism is that the same change in material circumstances can bring about different levels of happiness, and it's the happiness that counts -- so evening out the happiness means unequal material interventions.
The utilitarian wouldn't aim to even out the happiness, they'd aim to maximise the happiness. But it's trivially true that maximising happiness might lead to giving different people different levels of material aid. The point is simply that the utilitarian assigns equal weigh to the preferences or hedons of each.
Having more strongly held preferences was not one of the things that it was specified that Lance was superior in. And it's not clear that having super strongly held preferences is universally a good thing. The most death-adverse person in the world is probably not actually very happy.
But I guess my point is that many versions of utilitarianism would say that Scott and Lance are equal in exactly the way that Scott and the cow are not equal, and this holds regardless of whether Lance somehow has a lot more brain cells.
We can admit that Lance's preference is more valuable in this case, but also admit that the difference is small enough that using it in ours not-perfect finite-computing-power ethical calculations/euristics would provide less utility than simply not doing it.
Because doing it would provoke overestimation of difference and the result of such calculation would be less precise in expectation. And also because it would make Scott feel bad.
But the difference between the human and the cow is much much bigger.
This generalises to a lot of consequentialist systems, and is part and parcel with the example about who gets the parachute - if Lance is very good at improving the lives of other Lances, but Scott's better at improving the lives of other Scotts, do Lances and Scotts each count for the same amount? If so, that's the equal moral worth. If not, it all gets recursive and weird if you don't ground morality in something different.
(eg. if you say Lance-type people's wellbeing matters more because they're bigger and stronger, that's arbitrary but externally grounded; if you say Lance-type people's wellbeing matters more because they help Lance-type people more and Lance-type people's wellbeing matters more, that's circular)
Added for the sake of the example, but my point is more that if it doesn't matter who they're helping (which it doesn't seem to in the original), then that's the relevant equality.
Completely agreed, but I think you can generalize to other moral systems as well. Regardless of the moral system, you both have equal status as moral patients. I've always assumed this is what was meant when people say that everyone is equally valuable.
Why would admitting that Lance is superior to you make you depressed? I think it's great that there are people who are overall better than me, whom I can look up to and respect. Thinking this doesn't diminish me in any way, or commit me to deprioritizing myself. (Another problem solved by ethical egoism! I need not be better in any objective way to put myself first.)
>But I've learned over the course of my life that a shocking number of people are deeply, deeply envious
I'm curious, could you elaborate? Along what dimension are they envious? Economically? Medically? Sexually? Power? Prestige? Some other form of status or resource?
( Personally, I wish I had my youth back, but, of course, that is _impossible_ as biotech currently stands. I'm admittedly pretty lucky economically, though not in the 1%, but I have a very hard time imagining being significantly envious of anyone that I know of. )
>Along the lines of sociometric status. So "popularity", intelligence, and perceived sexual access are the big dimensions where I've seen the green-eyed monster come out in a way that I wasn't expecting.
Many Thanks! Hmm... I could see wanting better intelligence (more specifically, more reliable short-term and long-term memory...). As for the rest, I have a mildly jaundiced view, "Be careful what you wish for". Popularity can imply _unwanted_ attention at times, and re sexual access - well, all relationships have trade-offs. Personally, I was married to my late wife for over 30 years, and, even after decades of discussions there were still some sore points even in our last years.
Good point. It's great to see that other people are better at certain things - it gives you something to strive for, and hope that some day you may be as good as they are, or at least better than you are now.
The intrusive thought pattern goes something like: "Lance is genetically superior to me. This implies that if my parents had to decide between my embryo and Lance's, they would have picked Lance's. I am, therefore, the suboptimal option; a mistake. I should not have existed. Indeed, there are large groups of people saying people like me should not exist right now. Perhaps it is not too late to rectify the mistake."
But YOU are not your genetic configuration or your embryo? This reminds me of people who say "it would be horrible to know my mother contemplated abortion", even if she did this wasn't about you because YOU didn't exist then? Idk maybe I have too time bound notions of personhood, but I just don't understand why people would identify with the zygote they developed from?
Another analogy is worrying that your long term partner could have found someone better/more suited, in the sense of "not being the best possible match". Sure. But they didn't. They're with you.
There is no original mistake because there was no Embryo Lance to pick. Had EL existed, he'd have been picked and you wouldn't be here. The choice isn't between the world with you and the world with Lance, the choice is between the world with you and without Lance and the world without either of you or Lance. And the last option is only plausible if you're genuinely net negative for the world, which for most humans approximates to people you personally know/know you, and while it's not impossible, it's pretty unlikely.
Being suboptimal doesn't mean being worthless. Otherwise we fall into some kind of "everyone is beautiful and noone is more beautiful than others and to say otherwise is literal genocide" weirdness.
"Another analogy is worrying that your long term partner could have found someone better/more suited, in the sense of "not being the best possible match". Sure."
Indeed, that is also an incredibly familiar pattern of intrusive thoughts. Thanks.
> "but I just don't understand why people would identify with the zygote they developed from?"
I don't understand why people *wouldn't*. If you're going to identify with anything, at all, ever, surely zygote/baby/child/general-past-you is the first thing to come to mind? It does, after all, have a great deal of ontological continuity.
> "Another analogy is worrying that your long term partner could have found someone better/more suited, in the sense of "not being the best possible match". Sure."
Weird, I think this in a positive way. "Heh, I have cheated fate, and done better than I deserve. My partner and their actual fated One True Pairing: they lose out for my gain, hahahaha, suckers"
Yes this. I am happy that numerous people are better than me on many dimensions, and occasionally IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY. I don't need to be the best (tho not being the worst satisfied the gross social monkey brain that constantly keeps comparing). I just need to be at some acceptable level on some things that matter to me. That level is not relative (unless in a very abstract sense) and certainly nowhere near the ceiling of humanely possible.
Because that's what the emotions of happiness and depression evolved for. Success and status gains make you feel happy, and the happiness makes you pursue them -- the inverse for status loss and failure.
Note how the manifestations of depression -- quiet voice downcast eyes, slouching posture -- all signal low status.
I think the bad but true answer is that our idea of capitalism/'meritocracy' is predicated on everyone being in competition with everyone on every axis all the time, and so anyone in your orbit being better than you at anything is a direct threat to your value and outcomes.
Like, think about how we talk about 'mating markets'. If you really believe that everyone has a 'mate value' and the markets sort themselves out with matches going from top to bottom, then anyone superior to you joining your social circle means you get bumped down to the next-less-attractive mate.
I don't think that's actually how it happens, but the metaphors and models we use for these things makes it feel that way.
>"…anyone in your orbit being better than you at anything is a direct threat to your value and outcomes."
Comparative advantage to the rescue; as long as they're not exactly proportionally better in all dimensions simultaneously, there are still gains from trade to be had.
I don't think comparative advantage really applies to unique, high-value goods in one-off trade decisions?
Like if I have some ming vases and the Oppenheimer Blue, and you have Rubens' Venus and Adonis, and we'd both consider trading, how do we decide on the optimal trade?
And that's before considering the effects of time on people / relationships (as in, everyone ages or changes at different rates and in different directions, and most relationships decline in quality).
Comparative advantage is much more about ongoing production capabilities, and I think has little applicability to decisions like this.
Rereading, I realize I may have originally misread the above excerpt ("…anyone in your orbit being better than you at anything is a direct threat to your value and outcomes.") interpreting the word "anything" as equivalent to "everything" in this context; if that was not the intended meaning, then my response is something of a non sequitur.
AFAICT, there's no easy way to see the parent of one's own comment; if there is, I would appreciate a pointer.
Without that context (especially with my likely misinterpretation of the excerpt I quoted), I was lost.
ETA: I stumbled on the comment I originally replied to, and the mention of mating markets is in a paragraph following the bit I quoted. I was responding to the bailey of the first paragraph.
I find it helpful to separate people into their capabilities and their capacity for experience (I'm sure there's a better term for this but I don't know it.) Lance may have superior capabilities to you and for that reason it may maximize utility to save his life over yours. But externalities aside, you are equal in the sense that you both equally deserve happiness and equally don't deserve pain. That is, although others may be more or less capable than you, no one is more or less deserving than you.
Imagine if Scott and Lance were both hungry, and I have two meals that are identical in every way except one tastes better than the other. It won't help Lance more effectively improve the world or anything, it just tastes better. Does Lance deserve it more than Scott?
The point is that the "save a life" question is confounded by the fact that saving my life both makes me happy and also allows me to perform various tasks. Most things are like that: my go-to example is that paying surgeons a lot of money saves them time and keeps them healthier in various ways that actually help them surgeon better, it's not just a reward for being so cool. But if hypothetically we can think of some reward that really truly is just a reward, and not a tool, then the Lance/Scott distinction evaporates (according to those who endorse "everyone is equal")
"Tastes better" is, of course, subjective (which I think also gets to the heart of the question, in considering whole-person value judgements). Perhaps it's a vegetarian curry, which Scott likes but Lance, being a carnivore, doesn't like as well.
Sure, people can agree on some things (more money is better, more time is better, better to be alive than dead) but even in trying to formulate examples I'm finding it hard to find universal things on which people would agree. Larger house is better? Some people will think it wasteful and prefer a smaller house. Faster car? It uses more resources for power. Bicycle is better than a car? Too slow for some people.
this seems irrelevant to the question-- if they prefer different meals then it's not the situation described. If they both prefer the same meal, with the same degree of preference, then they are equal.
The point is that whatever criteria you use to divide the meals, Lance's relative superiority at math/sports/charity isn't relevant
No, my point really is that "better" is subjective. How do you know whether someone is "better" at math? Yes, most people agree Einstein was better than average, but in life, everything has a trade-off. It may be hard to tell what the trade-off is for math skills, but sometimes it's poorer social skills. Most nerds, myself included, wouldn't give up technical skills for social skills even if it were a choice to be made.
If you compare two people, it isn't really possible to say one is objectively better than another. One must use value judgements. One can say one is better at, say, solving problems which math helps solve, but that doesn't make them a better person overall.
that's literally the argument made in the entire post. There's no rule that says all of our various advantages and disadvantages have to equal out to being the same. If you define "superior" as "measurably better", then for sure some people have higher total genetic advantages than others. And if you define it as "morally equal under utilitarianism (or the eyes of God, or whatever)", then genetic advantages are irrelevant, don't even need to be mentioned.
It seems like the possibility/inevitability of pain is a baseline of existence. It isn't about deserving or undeserving. You will experience it and how you face it down or how you decide to integrate it helps shape your character. Experiencing it, both physical and psychic or spiritual, are essential. Without them you will not understand what others experience and will not be motivated to prevent yourself causing pain to others. Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are rooted in what happens when you don't experience pain as the main character has leprosy.
>…. It isn't about deserving or undeserving. You will experience it and how you face it down or how you decide to integrate it helps shape your character.
There seems to be a common sentiment that some people DO deserve pain as a punishment for doing bad things. For instance, I bet a lot of people would say Hitler deserves pain.
Are you taking the position that no amount of misdeeds can ever make someone deserve pain? If so, are you against punishments in general, or only certain kinds of punishments?
Are you also against rewards for merit? For instance, is it wrong to pay a bonus to the employee with the best performance, because all employees are equally deserving of whatever happiness money can buy?
Nobody intrinsically deserves pain, but sometimes it maximizes utility for everyone to punish people. I'm in favor of killing/imprisoning Hitler because doing so prevents worse things from happening (both from Hitler and those who want to imitate him but will be deterred by his punishment.) I'm not in favor of tormenting him in ways that don't provide any benefit.
I think you could make a similar case for employee rewards. All employees equally "deserve" to enjoy the rewards, but giving them only to well-performing employees is still a good idea because it results in better productivity.
Given the capacity to go back in time and assassinate Hitler, it would probably be better to bribe an art school to keep him busy and out of trouble by handing them a pile of modern consumer electronics, along with the recommendation that whatever bits they can't make good use of themselves should be sold to Alan Turing.
1. Even if one person might deserve the last parachute more than another, I think there is a sense we treat people equally in normal circumstances. As in being forced to sit at the back of the bus. I think inferiority is tied to this idea.
2. I think we are suspicious that calling people inferior is being done without the kind of rigorous evaluation Scott presents in this article and so it is generally best to avoid such judgements.
I'd argue that putting any thought at all into what embryo you want is still a more rigorous evaluation than the more common method of just having a baby at random. Even if you're Hitler and your entire basis is how Aryan they are, as long as being Aryan isn't actively bad you're not making things any worse.
The danger, and what I think people fear when they argue against this, is that by allowing culture to value something like "Aryan" above something else (at least "non-Aryan" but much more likely something else specific like "Jew" or "Gypsy" or whatever) we risk getting into a situation where already-living people are valued differently as well. Using your example, Hitler was able to get a lot of people to agree with him about giving huge benefits to some and cause huge harm to others, based on these categories.
Down Syndrome is a much trickier example than cystic fibrosis. It's also an area where we're seeing selective abortion being approved of and even lauded in some societies. It's not hard to imagine a society that takes that further - marginalizing the few that have the condition, limiting their rights (involuntary confinements, etc.), offering euthanasia to their parents even after they are born, and - not yet but maybe in the future - requiring euthanasia or for someone to guarantee that such people will not become burdens on the state/society.
We probably can't do anything about people having personal preferences, though we may be able to influence their preferences. We certainly can do something about what we allow people to do medically or what outward expressions of their preferences we tolerate.
For a historical example, look up Aktion T4, fueled by the nasty combination of eugenic philosophy, Nazi racial propaganda, and wartime economic pressures.
> Down Syndrome is a much trickier example than cystic fibrosis. It's also an area where we're seeing selective abortion being approved of and even lauded in some societies. It's not hard to imagine a society that takes that further - marginalizing the few that have the condition, limiting their rights (involuntary confinements, etc.), offering euthanasia to their parents even after they are born, and - not yet but maybe in the future - requiring euthanasia or for someone to guarantee that such people will not become burdens on the state/society.
This doesn't seem to follow, at least for modern Western societies. Modern Western ethics treats all conscious humans as ethically important & therefore deserving of life, unless (& not everyone accepts this exception) they actually prefer not to live, & of freedom, unless they are mentally incapable of understanding & decision (e.g. young children, involuntary mental patients) or choose to act sufficiently immorally (imprisoned criminals). Selective abortion of fetuses with Down Syndrome doesn't provoke outrage (except among pro-life people) because it happens before the fetus has become a conscious person as most people would see it, & so there is no ethical problem with aborting the fetus in order to have a superior (more able, less sick) child. Involuntary killing of disabled people, even pre-rational infants (cf. the reaction to Peter Singer), does provoke general outrage because such people are generally seen as people deserving of rights. Likewise, most people would be outraged at the imprisonment of a disabled person who has committed no crime & who is capable of rational decision entirely because of their disability. This might change in a situation where resources are scarce enough that supporting the disabled imposes substantial costs on the rest of the population (e.g. from food scarcity in preindustrial societies or during wars or similar crises), but that does not seem likely in the foreseeable future in the developed Western countries.
It is true that such consequences might come to pass in a culture that did not value human life & personal freedom, e.g. the common abandonment of unwanted children & acceptance of enslavement in some ancient cultures. The Nazis' killing of the disabled is also an example of this, since Nazi ideology held that genetically inferior people were unworthy of life (though the populace of Nazi Germany didn't entirely agree: the Nazis pretended to end the T4 program after widespread protest against it, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4 ).
While I agree that *current* norms in Western countries would not support the killing of adults with Down Syndrome or various other conditions, that wasn't at all my point. My concern is that by allowing different norms now, we will alter how people feel about those kinds of conditions in a way that makes it easier to move towards new norms. We should not be comfortable simply stating that it's not preferred now, especially when preferences have noticeably shifted in related areas in the last 10 or so years. For instance euthanasia has become much more acceptable in Western countries over that time period. Selective abortion has as well. These are not minor changes in norms.
For evidence, I pointed to times in the past when norms were different and people really did feel more comfortable killing the disabled and mentally challenged. In fact, in some specific cases even lots of people with no mental or physical issues at all, just based on cultural differences and an acceptance of death/imprisonment/forced labor as a means to deal with them.
> limiting their rights (involuntary confinements, etc.)
Aren't we already limiting their rights? I was under the impression that they're basically considered minors their whole lives. Which means they can be involuntarily confined. Or are you saying that we as a society have already gone to far with Down Syndrome?
Personally, I think we're teetering on the edge of "too far" with Down Syndrome specifically. But my point is more general, with DS being an example since society is already considering giving them fewer rights than they currently have (I consider not being selectively aborted a type of "right" even though that's not really a thing in most countries).
Canada expanding the range of who can be considered for euthanasia is perhaps a better example. A few years ago the current list would seem insane, and a few years from now it's likely to have been expanded. Apparently in 2022 4.1% of all Canadian deaths were from formal assisted suicide.
I don't want to have a debate about whether assisted suicide is okay or whether the list of acceptable reasons is good or bad. Just pointing out that when we as a society devalue human life, we keep going with it and death is often the end result. We can still agree that's okay, but we should be very aware before breaking Shelling fences that we may not have a good stopping place before we find ourselves euthanizing Down Syndrome or schizophrenia adults or whatever thing we might currently find impossible to believe.
"We certainly can do something about what we allow people to do medically or what outward expressions of their preferences we tolerate."
Or you could just mind your own business. "To avoid you maybe/potentially limiting my rights many years in the future, I need to limit your rights now" is an argument that goes both ways. Maybe you're the one who needs to be silenced, stripped of voting rights, or deported from the country?
I feel like you're reading me backwards, as I'm advocating for *not* removing people's voting rights or deporting them or whatever negative thing.
If I have a preference for killing people I find inferior, I would hope you would stop me from carrying that out, or jail me if I try/succeed. I'm not advocating that you silence me in this case.
If I have a preference for not hanging out with people I find inferior, then that's not illegal and shouldn't be, and we all move along with our lives (but feel free to not like me or hang out with me because of my choice).
Euthanasia, forced sterilization, selective abortion. I'm talking about the kind of things that have been forced on poor people and "mentally deficient" people quite a few times in the last hundred or so years.
I think there knock on effects that come from as well as inevitable consequences to “trying to make babies as strangers as possible” that can definitely make things worse.
Being human is giving the last parachute to someone else because you believe they are more deserving, not demanding the last parachute because you are more deserving. It is noble to give up your bus seat to someone you think deserves it more, but not to claim a bus seat because you need it more.
Unless you happen to be Lebron James, it's hard to play a lot of sports and not be frequently reminded that you are genetically inferior to some people at that sport.
It's curious how America has a sports crazed culture, but our intellectual conventional wisdom has learned so little from sports.
I'm reminded of how President Obama read David Epstein's insightful 2013 human biodiversity book "The Sports Gene" and was so much taken by what he read that in the dog days of his late second term, he took to lecturing guests on what he'd learned from it. Obama is a well-read guy, but he seemed to react so positively to Epstein's book that my guess is he was thinking, "Finally, in my 50s, they publish a book that makes sense out of the patterns I've observed in decades of playing basketball and golf and watching ESPN Sportscenter."
We don't mind people differing in athletic ability because we don't attach any inherent importance to it. It's a nice thing to have but otherwise inconsequential and certainly not something to boast about.
But modern American culture, particularly that of progressive white-collar middle class people, absolutely does attach inherent importance to being smart. It's thekey to career success and social standing. Of course, we like to tell ourselves we don't since that would run afoul of "All Men Are Created Equal" and all that. But at a certain level we know we're lying to ourselves, so the idea that people might differ in their inherent capacity for intelligence bugs us on a fundamental level.
I think we do attach inherent importance to athletic ability, but damned if I can prove that's how the culture views athletic ability.
I read _The Sports Gene_, and it leaves me wondering what sports are supposed to do-- I already wondered that, but the book underlines it. It seems like all that competition is supposed to prove something, but what?
Sports are training for war and hunting, the most important activities of the male half of the human race for most of the generations of human prehistory.
Yes. Though what I had in mind more was that much of modern wars are more about logistics and preparation and general pencil pushing, than about anything to do with sports.
There's still an athletic side to war. But it's not nearly as decisive as it used to be.
And I would wager that if you offered young males a choice between being 1 SD more athletic and physically attractive and 1 SD more intelligent, many, if not most, would choose the additional athleticism. The same pattern would be true for young women given the choice between more beauty and attractiveness versus greater intelligence. Intellectuals hugely overvalue intelligence compared to other people.
How are you gonna passively throw in "physically attractive" as if it's not massively more valuable and high-status than either athleticism or intelligence
I recommend _The Sport Gene_-- it's interesting about what counts as a useful genetic advantage for a sport and what doesn't. For example, top batters don't have especially fast reflexes, what they've got is great eyesight.
Women who win marathons are generally short because of the need for heat dissipation. But slightly taller women win in cooler weather. This is what got me onto the question of what sports are about.
There's also genetic (?) variation in how much people get from training.
> We don't mind people differing in athletic ability because we don't attach any inherent importance to it. It's a nice thing to have but otherwise inconsequential and certainly not something to boast about.
Having a more athletic body to show off certainly helps in finding a mate. That's very important for many people.
I would say that we inherently value attractive partners. From the perspective of evolution-as-optimizer it's instrumental, but it embedded the preference in us inherently
>We don't mind people differing in athletic ability because we don't attach any inherent importance to it.
Some people believe "football's not a matter of life and death -- it's much more important than that".
It's less inherent importance, and more that people decide their status within reference classes. Sport is unimportant to people who are geting their status from education, money etc.
I don't think anyone actually believe football is life or death, but I take your point that different social groups attach importance to different traits with varying weight. I tried to make that point by emphasizing that I was talking about the liberal/progressive set that comprises so much of our intelligentsia, but I could have been more explicit.
The situation is very weird. We *do* attach inherent importance on high levels of athletic ability, to the point that such people can get paid millions of dollars per year. But nobody, however leftist, seems to complain about it. OTOH, the fraction of people who can get paid for athletic ability is a small fraction of one percent, so the difference between "ordinary" people in athletic ability is generally irrelevant.
Then again, the politics of even that can be complicated. E.g. I can make a movie about basketball titled "White Men Can't Jump" but it gets dicey to assert that American Blacks are generally better muscled than American Whites, even though that also has something to do with basketball (and probably with why so many slaves were bought from West Africa).
I've definitely seen complaints about college sports coaches getting paid better than anyone else in the public sector, particularly non-athletics-oriented teachers.
Successful entertainers are well paid, including athletes.
If you're extremely athletically talented but just one step down from the "major leagues" that people bother to watch, you earn poverty wages for your talents, if you earn wages at all.
Come on, you know what happened (and it's the reason your career took so long to take off). Nobody wants to touch you-know-what because (1) it reminds everyone of the Nazis (2) there's a whole intellectual edifice built around denying any sort of genetic component to lots of things at least in part because it might lead to that (3) it undermines a large argument for redistribution since you can't blame all disparities on environment anymore.
Buying my dad a copy of Noticing for Father's Day, BTW. I'm going to stack it under copies of White Fragility and Anti-Racist Baby I bought at Ollie's, and fill in the rest of the empty space in the box with Trump ties.
You wrote: "Another possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am"
I believe this is very wrong. In fact, the crashing airplane example actually shows why. I don't know anyone who believes in that scenario (or even the more likely scenario of limited space in the lifeboats) that the "superior" person should get priority. In fact, the idea of superiority sounds ridiculous to me. In this actual scenario historically, at least a scenario where the person doesn't have special skills that may help the group, who would get the parachutes or lifeboats seats would be chosen based first on age and gender ("women and children first") and then perhaps by lots.
We (correctly in my view) don't believe that a more naturally gifted or skilled person is a "superior person" in a fundamental sense. To the extent that we call someone a "better person" it usually has more to do with (1) what they have done with what they have and (2) how they treat others rather than basing that judgement on skills and abilities.
I think this is right, but maybe does not go deep enough. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that the question of superiority is irrelevant in many scenarios except a few narrow ones involving directly the skills required.
I think that it's not just irrelevant, but it is toxic and will lead to awful outcomes. Except the cases in which superiority in a given skill is the point, like in a sport competition, the concept itself of superiority should never be in people's minds. Because the natural next step is to think what to do once we established the ranking. For instance, denying people help when it comes to a crashing airplane.
Scott makes the humble thought experiment of him being the "inferior" but what if we turn it to its head? Would Scott take the parachute for himself if he was on a crashing airplane with a person who writes slightly worse posts about effective altruism than him?
The concept itself of putting numbers on everything to rank them up leads inevitably to monstrous outcomes -- whether those are "worth points" like in this post, or dollars in a market quantifying everything including opinions, or many other scenarios (my relationship ended because my partner insisted that we should split 50/50 the amount of minutes of every chore in the house, which of course led both of us to try and find ways of cheat the other by counting things differently and make it so the other always "owed" us minutes of free time... yikes!).
Is it clear that we can evade the dilemmas by refusing to do the math? I think the math is mostly useless handwaving unless you are a hospital admin setting budgets. But that won’t help me if I find myself in a real dilemma.
I don't think we are *refusing* to do the math, we are just acknowledging that the math is not something we as mortals can sensibly do. You cannot ask which of these two people will create more utils, because utils are not real things.
I'm pretty sure that you're using mathematical comparisons all the time when judging between amounts of utility. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any reason to prefer one outcome over another.
As for how many utils you'll get, that depends on what scale you use. Just like how we can use Celsius or Fahrenheit, the numbers will be very different, but the thing being measured is always the same.
Actually, I think we can prove even to the most fundamentalistic utilitarian that "Women and children first (and then men draw lots)" is the best solution.
90% of people who watch Titanic will agree that it is right to let the women and children go first, and that the men rich men who muscle into the life boats are total jerks. Most people have a high preference for living in a world where we don't have to believe we and everyone else are jerks.
If somehow we made it common and accepted knowlege that "great scientists and highly productive engineers go first", everybody (including the scientists) would feel a lot worse about the world they lived in. Even if they never will be on a sinking ship in need of lifeboats.
But by establishing the new rule you are probably saving less than one great medicine inventor pr year.
So you would be be trading a large amount of depression for the entire population in exchange for a tiny amount of extra progress. Doing the math implies we should not consider worth/inferiority when handing out lifejackets.
In Nozick's thought experiment in which people could choose which world to live in, would people choose to live in the children-first world rather than the one that prioritized great scientists?
Maybe that's because we already live in children-first world. It's plausible that people from great-scientists-first world would also prefer to stay in their world.
That's not even that weird of a conclusion. Children are the literal hope for the future.
A society that sacrifices their children for the good of the adults is a society that destroys itself permanently for a short term benefit to the current generation.
Yeah, it might be hardwired by evolution. Or maybe not. Im pretty agnostic about how humans got to be what they are.
But one funny thing: If all people who became chemical engineers for medicine companies were told that they now had a duty to grab parachutes out of the hands of pregnant women... I think fewer people would want to work in the medical industry.
It should be remembered that the logic of women and children first is not necessarily that they're more valuable but that they're less likely to survive a couple of hours in the freezing cold water without a lifeboat.
The year is 1943. A passenger ship is torpedoed while carrying Alan Turing (the allies' best codebreaker), John Von Neumann (the allies' best polymath), and some 16-year-old rapists. Who should get priority on the lifeboats?
Maybe sometimes the calculation problem is hard enough to require deontological guardrails. Or self-serving biases would create disagreement about rankings that can be evaded by drawing lots. But it's also easy to construct scenarios where the calculation problem is too easy to require any calculation at all. Pre-committing to refusing to rank people can cost you arbitrarily large amounts of utility in those scenarios.
> I believe this is very wrong. In fact, the crashing airplane example actually shows why. I don't know anyone who believes in that scenario (or even the more likely scenario of limited space in the lifeboats) that the "superior" person should get priority. In fact, the idea of superiority sounds ridiculous to me. In this actual scenario historically, at least a scenario where the person doesn't have special skills that may help the group, who would get the parachutes or lifeboats seats would be chosen based first on age and gender ("women and children first") and then perhaps by lots.
I'd say that in ordinary lifeboat scenarios you're right, but in extreme ones Scott is right. Like if you've got a brilliant biologist vs, well, someone of no particular note, you pick the former. But if it's a non-extreme case, you choose by lot rather than argue over who deserves it more.
Why? Basically because if there's even remotely any ambiguity, arguing is not going to lead to any agreement as everyone favors themselvs, and it probably breaks out into violence, which will be needlessly destructive, whereas the casting of lots is mutually agreeable and can hopefully prevent that. But as the difference increases, this A. increases how much it matters to pick the right person, and B. decreases the ambiguity of the right answer, leading to picking this way being more mutually agreeable with a lower chance of violence. So I would say there is some point at which it tips over from the one solution to the other.
In a lifeboat situation, folks would likely agree to favor someone if they believe they have a unique set of skills (e.g. the ability to navigate at sea) that are necessary to help the group survive.
But I don't believe folks would choose the better biologist or say Mozart over Salieri. While we might recognize that they would make better contributions to the world, we don't believe that makes them "better people." And in fact, if they were to make the case that their superior skills mean they should be favored to get a seat on the lifeboat, we would actually see that as a sign that they are in reality a worse person.
> But I don't believe folks would choose the better biologist or say Mozart over Salieri
OK, but that wasn't the hypothetical I discussed. In a case like you're suggesting, yeah, probably best to draw lots. Sure one of these people may be the best choice, but it isn't so stunningly unambiguous that you can successfully argue that and avoid violence. I said at *some* point it does tip over, and you haven't addressed that (unless like you don't actually disagree and that's why you haven't addressed it).
> While we might recognize that they would make better contributions to the world, we don't believe that makes them "better people."
As the post says, I don't know what "better people" means. But we can more concretely discuss who is more valuable to the world to get home safely. (Although, as I said above, if there's going to be much argument over it, the people in the boat should be casting lots, not discussing that!)
(Remember, as Yudkowsky reminds us, when you see ambiguous terminology, the thing to do is usually to taboo/dissolve it and focus directly on the thing is actually relevant to your decision-making, not sit down to figure out exactly what this ambiguous terminology "means"! No sensible decisions can be made on this basis!)
> And in fact, if they were to make the case that their superior skills mean they should be favored to get a seat on the lifeboat, we would actually see that as a sign that they are in reality a worse person.
This is just playing around with terminology, or a form of equivocation really. We often say that someone is a "better person" or a "worse person" to mean that they're better/worse in some sense of, like, moral intention. But if the disparity is as great as I considered, then the biologist being a bit of a jerk isn't going to swing things. Being a "better person" in that sense, while relevant as an input, is not determinative. It only sounds like it might be because you're using the phrase "better person" to mean two differen things! The right thing to do here, again, is to eliminate the phrase and directly discuss what's relevant to decision-making.
I don't think it's really "playing around with terminology" or "equivocation" Sniff. I think it's actually getting at something important.
There are lots of ways that society rewards people like Lance: wealth, power, popularity, hot babes. etc. And while we may envy them, I think most of us consider that situation fair or at least not unreasonable.
But I don't think most of us would necessarily regard Lance as a "better person", in the sense of someone more deserving of a parachute in a crashing plane or (for believers) someone more likely to merit a place in heaven. Very different calculations go into that, which (to the extent that they can be defined) have to do with qualities like kindness, helpfulness, and making the most out of whatever circumstances we've been given.
And I'd suggest that one of those qualities that human beings consider important along this second dimension is the recognition of the distinction between these two kinds of measures of a person. Someone who believes that their superior intelligence/strength/speed/ability makes them a better person along the second dimension would actually be demonstrating themselves to be a worse person along that dimension.
In a lot of cases, scientific problems are worked on by multiple researchers, either together or independently, so there's a good chance that even if you remove the discoverer, someone else will come up with the same theory sooner or later. OTOH, if you removed Mozart, it's not like another composer would write Figaro instead, or at least not as Mozart would have written it.
I don't have a problem explicitly choosing Singer over Hitler. Or frankly pretty much anyone over Hitler. And the same goes for lots of people who have done far less evil.
I'm fine with (and would agree with) a society that decides there are anti-social acts whose consequences include the loss of a right to parachute.
What I'm arguing against is the idea that good qualities or accomplishments somehow make someone a better person or more worthy of the parachute. Or that someone's lesser qualities make them a lesser person or less worthy.
If I imagine two versions of me, one that was born without legs and one with, I would unhesitatingly choose to be the one with legs. And if this were detected in vitro, I wouldn't have a problem aborting the version of myself without.
But if these two versions of me were in a plane with only one parachute or a sinking ship with only spot on a lifeboat, I believe they should each get an equal shot.
I think the trick is that, if you say that some people are better than others, you support the bad word and are therefore a Nazi, whereas if you don't, then you fail to condemn Hitler enough and are therefore a Nazi.
There's a difference between saying someone is a worse person because of things they've chosen to do, and saying someone is a worse person because of innate abilities or genetic makeup. At least if you aren't a determinist, which most people aren't.
"if you've got a brilliant biologist vs, well, someone of no particular note, you pick the former"
This assumes that the world will be a better place with the biologist than with the ordinary person. And if we define "better" narrowly enough, like less disease or hunger or material deprivation, then on the margins, sure. But what if the brilliant biologist has almost no friends or family that love them, while the ordinary guy is a beloved member of an ordinary community, who brings lots of people joy? Or what if he's just totally normal guy that's supporting a wife and three kids and also trying to help his parents in their old age? There are other dimensions to "better" than what we can easily quantify in terms of material well-being.
I guess you could argue that this particular biologist is so brilliant that they and they alone will be capable of some profound discovery, like finding a way to cure all cancer or something. That seems like the great-man theory of history. It might be true in some limited circumstances but I don't think it's a good rule of thumb. If Einstein hadn't been born, I think someone else would have figured out relativity. Would it have taken significantly longer? I don't know, maybe? There is just *so* much uncertainty when you are trying to project out something like "total human value" over the course of an entire life and beyond, and I think we should be very humble in the face of that uncertainty.
> while the ordinary guy is a beloved member of an ordinary community, who brings lots of people joy? Or what if he's just totally normal guy that's supporting a wife and three kids and also trying to help his parents in their old age?
I don't think Scott's right in the parachute case, at least not in a way that matters.
The third passenger on the plane is Alice, a dangerous terrorist who is holding a dead-man's switch that will nuke Paris if she dies. Are Scott and Lance now "inferior" to her?
I also have a gut sense that there's some sort of, I dunno, Heisenbergian uncertainty tied up in these scenarios. You can't actually measure "human dignity" without putting people in a situation that would require them to act inhumanely.
> I don't know anyone who believes in that scenario (or even the more likely scenario of limited space in the lifeboats) that the "superior" person should get priority
This is not as intuitive an idea as you think it is.
When I was a very small child, my parents were watching some disaster movie and at some point, "women and children first!" was called out.
I was genuinely confused by that and asked my parents why women and children were considered "special?" I was a small kid, I knew many other small kids, and I had perfect knowledge that none of us were special enough to warrant being prioritized over an adult as a matter of course.
My mom said something about protecting children and women and that it was "just the right thing to do" and I scoffed at her that it was a stupid idea. Kids aren't special. Women aren't special. Everyone is just people.
And I've never really let go of that intuition. If I had to make decisions in a disaster situation I wouldn't hesitate to allocate resources to the people most likely to survive (and depending on the disaster, be useful afterwards). I'd like to think my moral intuition about this is so strong I'd be willing to sacrifice myself in the moment and then regret it later.
I think the "Sophie's choice" criterion of "very clearly more likely to survive" is very, very different than "more valuable" and while key in actual reality, not what this thought experiment is about.
The reason for choosing children (apart from the wired in emotion) and women (similar reason -- breeders, if young enough) rather than drawing random lots is one that also has nothing to do with "worth", which is that they have more to lose, statistically speaking. IF the likelihood of survival is equal in our hypothetical than choosing a child or a young person is a no brainer because a dead child or 18 year old is a whole life unlived lost. A dead me, only maybe another 20 years of anything worth having (for me, not the world). The equation would change a bit if I was a "valuable" person in a utilitarian sense, but still not override the basic 20 vs 50+ differential.
In the lifeboat scenario you're assuming that all children are going to live a useful and productive lives, which is obviously not true. After all, every predator and criminal alive today was a child once, with their whole lives (of tormenting others) in front of them.
Given that there's no way to know if a particular child is going to be a benefit or a menace to others, my intuition remains that it's better to save the "sure thing" of an accomplished and useful adult rather than a blank-slate child.
No, I'm not assuming that. I'm taking a risk - accepting that some children will turn criminal, hoping none will turn Hitler - because I'm NOT making a choice on the "worthiness" basis. We don't differ on the numbers here, we differ on fundamental values. If I have a young offender and young Mozart, in principle I'm STILL drawing lots between them.
We've now drifted even further away from the disaster hypothetical but perhaps closer to Scott's original premise.
Are your fundamental values / intuitions about people informed by a religious tradition? If so, then we probably can't productively debate these ideas.
As a person who is fundamentally justice-based and doesn't value generic spiritual principles on any level, I can't conceive of the worldview and/or emotions which would permit a young offender to be selected at the expense of a non-offender, not even by chance. I mean, are you considering the offender's future victims? What if you could be certain that you or one of your loved ones is fated to be one of the offender's future victims? Would that foreknowledge change your determination to draw lots between an offender and a non-offender?
I'm an atheist, and grew up in an atheist family, but I think it's very difficult to avoid being influenced to some extent by broadly speaking spiritual notions of human "soul", or whatever one uses in place of that; ideas of not using humans as means, etc.
I think what's more significant is that I come from the part of the world fairly recently particularly marred by genocide (always run on the superiority/inferiority or "objectively harmful for the cause" grounds) so I'm very sensitive to potential consequences of adopting such ideas, when they can be imposed on others against their will (I accept personal sacrifice for the greater good, but it has to come from the potential victim).
As to future victims of the young offender. While it's more probable that more people will suffer, I don't know that. Maybe the experience of being saved despite being "undeserving" will change that person into a great benefactor. Maybe the Mozart will die 3 days after the rescue and the offender would get cleaned up and without becoming quite a saint would still live an ok life with his wife and kids. We DON'T KNOW.
I think if I KNEW that the offender would cause real severe harm to *some* others and the Mozart would not, it would change the calculation. But I will never know for sure so it's moot.
I think the only situation in which it would be preferable to act on probabilities would be harm of genocidal proportions. I do realise that I lack consistency here, but here we go. I'd make a choice against Hitler on probabilities.
I think this calculation depends on the baseline frequency of any person being a benefit vs menace as an adult. And the world has gotten better as population expands, because people tend to be more benefit than menace.
A society of accomplished adults and no children is nice while it lasts, and it isn't going to last long. For our ancestors, getting completely wiped out was a possibility, and that's where our moral instincts come from.
Why is this the assumption? If a random child is a blank slate then so is a random adult. Even if they were accomplished and useful before seeing people sacrifice a child to save them, there's no guarantee they'll be so on the other end.
Because the likelihood of an adult having life-ruining trauma and guilt for being saved over a (stranger's!) child is relatively low. If that adult has any kind of family obligations (caring for elderly parents, for their own children), then they're probably going to keep working rather than throw themselves off a bridge or whatever.
~80% of women gave birth, ~40% of men fathered children. Men are, relatively speaking, expendable. Women and children are also smaller, so you can save more of them with a lifeboat. I am, parenthetically, a guy, not a female supervillain.
This is all true, and I'm happy to buy it, but I don't think that's what's informing most people's intuitions and traditions about "women and children first."
Although - ha! - it occurs to me that conquering civilizations have traditionally had similar intuitions about "saving" the women and children it conquers. Maybe "women and children first" is far more about male expendability than the ephemeral value of women and children than we know.
Consider the German villages outside of Rome. They sent off their young males to war and most of them died; fierce warriors are meat on the table for disciplined soldiers. The village populations stayed pretty stable. If a Roman army walked past the village and... acquired... camp followers, the village died.
Not discussing worthiness angle, but generally woman and especially children have much lower survival rate in case of whatever disaster is happening - this is caused mostly by difference in physical strength and it was even worse when fashion for woman was mostly giant dresses.
So prioritising woman and children probably gave them *any* chance, rather than just increased them like it happened in case of the men. Also worth noting - woman and children first policy is a relatively new idea.
"Women and children (are prioritized to survive) first" isn't necessarily that new! It applies to disasters in modern times, but as discussed in another thread, it was often deliberately applied by conquerors during conquest. In that case, conquerors were often recognizing a real utility in keeping women (well, presumably fertile women) and children, but not men.
Yes, but there is a certain difference - as you mentioned, they are an asset after the war, but during shipwreck - they are a liability, as you get stuck in a tiny raft in the middle of the sea.
I didn't meant it literally, which is why I put it in a a parenthetical. I was more connecting the idea that (fertile) women and children tend to be prioritized by their conquerors and wanted to tie that phrase to "women and children first."
An alternate theory which I'm not sure is correct. If you value your culture (and most people seem to), then to a large extent it's transmitted by women, and it can only be carried into the future by children.
Children > Women >men has a very straightforward evopsych explanation -- woman and children allow the tribe to continue, men as defenders of the tribe are dispensible, and one man can impregnate multiple women anyway,
I think "women and children first" is a Shelling Point that try to ensure there will be no chaos and conflicts that get in the way of save someone. Something else could be Shelling Point and work just as good.
It's possible, of course, to track the motivations behind this particular Shelling Point, like "children have more expected life-years", "patriarchy establishes that men should be strong, brave and ready to sacrifice themselves". and some evolutionary reasons-of-reasons.
"Women and children first" is mostly a Hollywood fantasy anyway. It was the rule applied on the Titanic, and because that's the only shipwreck most people know about, people assume it's a general rule. But in most shipwrecks, grown men tend to be the first to be saved.
I agree this is a surprising norm. I would attribute it to men being stronger, both physically and (at least during the Titanic era) in terms of social power, and competing to show off their chivalry and the fact that they weren't going to seize the lifeboats by force. Compare to "the captain goes down with the ship" - the captain is the most powerful person, so as a concession to equality, he preemptively gives up his right to seize a lifeboat.
I always thought that was to do with the shame of losing a ship. The Italian guy who ran his ship aground, and escaped, ended up being punished severely.
And consider how comparatively more valuable ships were in history, when insurance and diversified funds and etc weren't as much of a thing as they are today.
In a tribal warfare or cooperative-hunting context, it's a patch for free-rider problems. To win the fight, you need enough guys in the shield wall. Anybody in the shield wall has a chance of dying even if their side wins. So, if somebody's confident that their side will win regardless, they'd be tempted to stay back at camp and let everyone else take those risks... but when too many do that, the undermanned shield wall collapses, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/
Huh, I always assumed "the captain goes down with his ship" as being more about ensuring the person with the most power is also the one most personally invested in avoiding the loss of a HUGE asset - the ship itself.
Or put another way, "the captain goes down with the ship" seems far more like "come back with your shield, or on it" than "women and children first."
I entirely agree -- saves me typing my own comment!
...but I HAVE encountered people who in the same thought experiment chose the "more valuable". I'm not sure about always actively choosing the more vulnerable (might get into Sophie's choice territory sometimes) but random lots seem the most ethically reasonable with the chosen having the option to swap/sacrifice.
The airplane is going to crash. There are 15 parachutes. The following people are present:
1. 3 mothers
2. 2 single women
3. 5 children, assorted genders
4. A world-class musician
5. A physics professor
6. A Nobel-laureate in literature
7. The plane's pilot
8. The plane's co-pilot
9. A convicted murderer who completed the sentence and is released
10. Someone scheduled to have a murder trial
11. A patient in drug-rehab
12. A current drug user not in rehab with no intention to change habits or go to rehab
13. An alcoholic that recognizes the problem but hasn't yet had a chance to try to change it
14. A celebrity news reporter everyone knows
What happens here? I don't know, and cannot definitively answer the question, so since it is only hypothetical anyway, I propose the 21 people end up fighting with each other over who gets the parachutes and the plane crashes with everyone aboard.
I'd guess the killers definitely get parachutes and then civilized rules reassert themselves and the mothers, then women and children, are saved, along with lots for remaining parachutes, if any. If the junkies are asleep maybe they don't get straws.
The practical answer that sidesteps the intent of the question is to share six of the parachutes. Parachutes have rated design loads that vary wildly, and you can get away with exceeding the load by a fair amount of you only need to use the parachute once and are willing to risk breaking a leg on landing. And tandem jumps are definitely possible provided you strap the two people together securely. Especially if you open the chute as soon as you're clear of the plane instead of at terminal velocity.
> Children have more remaining life years then adults.
This isn't actually an advantage for them; an adult can produce children - or anything else - in the future more quickly than a child can.
Reproductive capacity of the group is diminished by the loss of women, but not by the loss of men. This explains why women would be saved first, but it doesn't do anything to explain why children would get any priority.
You might note that in cases where there isn't enough to go around between a parent and a child, the parent is saved and the child is exposed. That's because the parent is more valuable than the child.
There's an inherent problem with Scott's hypothetical with Lance. He added in that Lance is more helpful to others than himself, but that would imply Lance would make sure Scott got the parachute in this case. If Lance is a self-serving person who chooses to give himself the parachute because he's "the better person" then that removes one of the most important criteria in the decision. If Lance was a jerk, we would care a lot less that he's smart and rich.
If Scott's making the decision about who should get the parachute, and offers it to Lance (and then Lance takes it), he's actually saying that Lance is *not* as good about helping others.
The idea that you should value yourself less than some other guy seems to me as wrong as the idea that you should value yourself more. It just usually has no negative impact on society so we let it pass.
Society consistently values someone voluntarily deferring to the needs of others. I think it's because of the huge bias we have in favor of ourselves. If we're willing to concede to someone else, it means we didn't just value them highly, but enough to overcome that bias.
Without that bias I don't think society would care and would look at it neutrally as you say. But we do have a huge bias, and pretending that we can look at life-or-death situations neutrally isn't helpful or healthy, it just gives people the opportunity to overvalue themselves and fight more for what they want at the expense of others.
Beautifully put. Also, the future is inscrutable so who knows which person will actually go on to do the most good. And another thing, it’s relatively easy to judge people based on particular attributes, choices or behaviours but to judge an entire person as better or worse than another without a gods-eye view is always bound to be partial and questionable.
I believe the superior person should get priority, and don't think there's even any doubt. In fact, like someone else points out, your example of women and children is also based on superiority!
Is value an objective fact? If it's a social construct, then people are of equal value when society says they are, which democratic societies tend to. You also have a notion of instrumental value , being good at things or valuable for things, that is more objective, but it's instrumental not terminal, so there is an element of talking-past in the debate.
And the reason that is done is because in a time-limited, high-stress environment you need to foster as much social cohesion as possible. You do so by 1) adhering strictly to cultural standards and 2) making everyone believe that there is a chance their preferences will be honored.
1) "Women and children" fits the US and probably Western cultural standard so you knock that out first to show empathy and concern.
2) "Draw lots" appeals to fairness and gives everyone a chance.
3) "People with skills needed to survive" is actually likely harder to get through because you need to communicate that this is a necessity, and communicate that your picked lifeboat pilot is indeed the most/only capable candidate. In fact you almost definitely need to lead off with explaining that your plan honors 1 and 2 to buy yourself the social credit needed to advance your candidates for 3.
But crisis leadership / realpolitik is not the same as morality. (I guess in a consequentialist viewpoint, the leader that saves a handful of random lives is more moral than the one that caused a mutiny, chaos, and death.) This is why for these kind of scenarios you have to kind of assume this is the slowest crash/sinking that has ever existed and an orderly discussion can occur over possibly a several week period with a figure who has autocratic control making the decision and an honor guard that prevents violence. I tend to prefer "spaceship evacuating a dying planet" or "bunker before the asteroid hits" scenario for a general framework, but even then there's a lot of political considerations that need to occur before you can get to the moral ones.
Reminds me of the later Wittgenstein. We can simply choose not to play the "inferiority" language game. This applies to so many other seemingly intractable debates as well.
Are abortions really about what is life? Stop playing the game of trying to define life and focus instead on "is our society better off if we agree to allow abortions before N weeks". That's one example.
Through this prism it's easy to see how many controversies and debates essentially boil down to metaphysical arguments, and are thus meaningless according to LW. Our brains get tricked into thinking something makes sense because language is like that. There are no clear edges to where things stop making sense. We actually revel in this fact and celebrate it - poetry, for example. No wonder we then waste years of our lives studying philosophy (best case) or being extremely mad about moral/political hot topics our entire lives (worse case).
Au contraire. That's just reducing the argument to a different language game. You pivot from life to "part of society" or "worthy of moral consideration", but that gets you nowhere. Everyone can just re-orient their positions to argue their values around the new framing of the question. Arguing over "what is society" or "what is morality" or "what is personhood" is not less pointless than arguing over "what is life". The only move is to discuss things pragmatically based on what decisions we have to make and what their outcomes might be. If you find yourself resorting to words like "death", "evil", etc you've once again fallen off the track and are back in metaphysics land.
The problem is that metaphysics matters. Imagine there's two black boxes. Both of them have a receptacle for raw materials and dispense finished goods. One of them is a fully automated robotic factory. The other is full of slaves working under horrible conditions. From the point of view of someone outside the black box, they seem completely identical. And yet, there's one that's okay to use and one that's not.
This is nonsense, and of course you know it. If you are going to act for the good of society, you must know what the society that you are acting on behalf of is and what good is your end.
Scott already brought up Nazis, so let’s take that as a clear example- they of course did not count the Jews (and the Slavs, etc) as members of society.
Or, even if they did consider them part of society, they may have still thought that society on the whole would be better off without the Jewish or Slavic parts.
"Is our society better off if...?" seems to me to be ends-justify-the-means style thinking, with all the awful consequences that might follow.
I don't think the ends justify the means. I don't *necessarily* think the means justify the ends, either. You have to approach these questions holistically.
> "Is our society better off if...?" seems to me to be ends-justify-the-means style thinking, with all the awful consequences that might follow.
I don't know if I agree with that. For example, is our society better off if we remove drunk drivers by any means necessary? Sure that would be terrible for drunk drivers. But what about the people they kill? Seems like there's a big status quo biais in accepting the state of society with murderers, rapists, etc.
I agree with this. The use of ”superior/inferior” in these debates is reminiscent of the use of ”greatness” in the ontological argument. If you introduce some vague measure of goodness without rigorously defining it, you can get a lot of rhetorical mileage out of it, but you’re not going anywhere in particular.
Yes. Or more precisely, about what is sentient. Or even more precisely, about what has a right to continue existing.
"is our society better off if we agree to allow abortions before N weeks"
That depends. Are the fetuses we're deciding to abort part of "our society"? We can all agree that your right to swing your fist ends where the other man's nose begins. But it's not helpful if we can't agree on what constitutes another man.
For what it's worth, I'm not pro-life, but I am vegetarian, which is the same fundamental disagreement.
> Yes. Or more precisely, about what is sentient. Or even more precisely, about what has a right to continue existing.
Steelman: even with the most extreme assumption of life beginning at fertilization, there is still a debate to be had. This is because it is actually about who can and cannot be forced to donate organs by law against their will.
It may be morally right for me to donate blood and/or a kidney to save a life, but the law will not force me to do so. I have body autonomy, and other people's rights start only where that ends.
It may be morally right for parts of my corpse to be used to save lives after I die, but even in opt-out legislations the law gives me a way to ensure this does not happen. My /corpse/ has body autonomy. People might disagree with my decisions, but they cannot prevent them.
Only when it comes to pregnant women, and this class of people alone, does the law require the woman to donate part of her body to preserve, however debatably, another life, regardless of her will.
Once the child is born, we stop caring about this class of actions once more: although responsible for the child in all manner of other ways, the mother is no longer required by law to donate so much as a fingernail against her will to save its life should the matter arise.
People may claim it's about saving life, but unless they are also arguing for loss of body autonomy in all these other scenarios, it is actually about forced pregnancy.
> People may claim it's about saving life, but unless they are also arguing for loss of body autonomy in all these other scenarios, it is actually about forced pregnancy.
If the logic of the comment I commented on was upsetting to you - people shouldn't be forced to give up their kidneys or part of their livers to living, sentient strangers, so they shouldn't be forced to give up gestation services to living strangers, either - then what do you think about my final reply to you?
Well...I find that argument highly disturbing. I definitely don't agree with it, and it seems to have some obvious holes (e.g. adoption is an option, especially when in most western countries couples wanting to adopt exceed children who need adopting).
On the other hand, it looks like a principled utilitarian argument that is worth discussing and analysing, even if it's disturbing. It's similar to "triage" arguments about killing people in overpopulated poor countries being the humane way to reduce poverty.
Compare the argument Throwaway1234 is making, which seems like one from pure selfishness. Unless they are *only* talking about the role of the law and not about morality at all (and my request for clarification about that below was not addressed), this kind of "I don't owe you anything" cold selfishness I find sickening even if said to a starving or sick child whose suffering you have no responsibility for. To say it about a child (the existence of a fully sentient child was explicitly assumed, which is the only reason I'm reacting like this) who you are directly responsible for the existence of by your own choices is beyond sickening. To say in a premeditated way, not from a position of fear or desperation while actually being undesirably pregnant, that you would not only have this attitude if you were, but that you would consciously act in a way that may bring this situation about and see nothing wrong with it (i.e. you are actively defending the right to have sex, consciously planning to simply abort any child that results, while accepting the child as fully sentient) is beyond *that*.
Tl; dr your argument is a utilitarian moral argument (that I think illustrates some major problems with utilitarianism, but reasonable people can disagree). An argument strictly about abortion being beyond the legitimate power of the law to regulate (while maintaining it would be horrifically evil to actually do) is a libertarian moral argument (as long as it's applied consistently to things like vaccine mandates and free speech). An argument that it's perfectly fine to consciously create a sentient child and then kill them for a selfish reason, on the other hand, is sociopathically amoral.
I may have missed something, but that's how this thread looks to me.
Given the premise - "the extreme assumption of life beginning at fertilization" - those organ-donation scenarios aren't useful analogues. They omit a crucial dimension of legal and ethical reasoning, about the degree of responsibility the actors have for each other's condition.
Instead we ought to ask how the law would respect my bodily integrity if I somehow induced another party to become dependent on my kidneys.
(Obviously, this analogy would not cover all pregnancies.)
...the spectrum of possibilities here also includes many things like failed birth control. One only has the blunt instrument of law to work with, however; hence the suggestion that the decision should be between a woman and her doctor, and the law has no place in it.
Meanwhile, if you are arguing for someone to remain pregnant and give birth when this is not their choice, you are arguing for forced pregnancy; if you don't like being called a duck, it may be worth reconsidering the quacking and the waddling. (The same, incidentally, goes for various "journalists tricking you into saying quotable things" scenarios).
Failed birth control is still an example of consensual sex. Sex between fertile humans always comes with the possibility of pregnancy. If one is not willing to accept the consequences, however remote they may be, then don't have sex, or make yourself infertile. And for the record, I hold men to the same standard, insofar as biology allows.
...such as by using birth control. The more "permanent" methods are also not perfect.
There are also the cases we are now seeing in the abortion ban states such as women forced to carry to term pregnancies that will not result in a living child and/or may endanger the woman's life. The list of exceptional situations grows, but the law is a blunt instrument that has no room for nuance or discretion, especially when the lawmakers are not willing to explicitly state the actual intent: pregnancy is the punishment for consensual sex.
Consensual sex is not the same thing as a desire to become pregnant. Meanwhile, the answer to "eating comes with a risk of food poisoning" is neither "then starve" nor "you chose the risk, you deserve the food poisoning so you can't get medical treatment"
Forced pregnancy. This line of argument is so dishonest and is a jumbo-sized motte-and-bailey.
You claim it's forced pregnancy. When it's pointed out that you can avoid pregnancy by not having sex*, you pivot to "punishing women for having sex". Truly unbelievable.
Imagine an egalitarian agrarian society where everyone can work on the harvest as much or as little as they want, and get a share of the grain in proportion to the amount of work they did. Everyone's treated the same and there's no coercion at all.
Then I complain "it's not fair, I don't want to work, you're forcing me to work that's slavery". When it's pointed out that I'm free to do no work and just not get any grain, I say "oh so you want me to starve, you are literally forcing me to starve". When it's pointed out that, no, if I'm lucky enough to find food elsewhere then all good, but if the harvested grain is what I want then all I need to do is put in some work on the harvest. "Oh, so you're forcing me to work, you're *punishing* me for not working". Round and round forever, and then I use this is as justification for killing another farmer and stealing their food.
No. I'm not being forced to work: if not working is so important to me, I can do so and accept less (reliable) food. I'm not being denied food: if getting a share of the grain is important to me, I can do some work on the farm. The one thing I'm being denied is *getting everything I want*, no matter the effect on others.**
If you're a woman who reallly doesn't want to get pregnant, you're not being forced to, you can simpy not have sex. If you really want to have sex, that's fine, just accept the risk of pregnancy if you're not lucky enough to avoid it. The one thing you are denied is getting everything you want by killing those who stand in your way.
I'd say grow up, but this would be an insult to children, who may be immature but are hardly ever this sociopathically, murderously selfish.
(*of course we're assuming exceptions for rape which everyone in this thread has endorsed. Raising that objection is another massive motte-and-bailey since you clearly really support it on demand)
(**never mind that back-breaking farm work is whole lot more of a burden than simply abstaining from sex. And never mind that going through a pregnancy is, except in a small minority of abortion-seeking cases, not remotely like starving to death).
Those who want to outlaw abortions are arguing for forced pregnancy in exactly the same way those who want abortions to be legal are arguing for killing babies. This is exactly why the issue is hard--the only way we know to avoid forcing a woman to carry a baby to term in her body is to let her kill the baby using some drugs or medical procedure. Approximately everyone agrees that both killing babies and forcing women to carry babies in their bodies is bad. We are stuck trying to work out what tradeoff between these two bad things is best.
Wow. I just...I guess I appreciate the honesty. It makes things clearer.
You see, I get so, so disturbed by the way pro-choicers typically talk, all this talk of choice and rights and not a *single word* about the fetus. Not a single sentence in a whole pro-choice screed that *of course* all this rights-reasoning *only* applies because the fetus is not sentient, and would *of course* be completely void if evidence arose that fetuses are conscious after all. And I think to myself, okay, maybe they are just taking this for granted. That even though it *sounds* like they're saying the fetus, even if sentient, is utterly irrelevant to them and they think only of themselves and are completely unconcerned with the infliction of pain and death on a sentient human child as long as they get what they want...their whole argument really does rest on the assumption of a total lack of sentience, even though they don't say it. That they don't think they need to explicitly clarify that they're not monsters.
And then, every now and then, comes someone like you making it crystal clear that no, my attempt at good-faith was misplaced, and many pro-choicers really are monstrously selfish on an unimaginable scale.
Now, *maybe* you want to say you're merely making a technical argument about the limits of the law, and aren't making any moral claim about actually getting an abortion at all. I don't believe it. Anyone who really is only arguing for a limit on the scope of the law would make it very clear that, if a fetus is indeed fully sentient, an abortion would be an act of unimaginably horrific evil, something that they would never ever do, or in any way support or enable, and that they would ostracise anyone who did get an abortion for anything less than an extremely compelling reason, even if they don't think it should technically be *illegal*. Funnily, I have basically never seen that said.
Compare free-speech-for-nazis absolutists, who are usually pretty clearly explict about nazis being horrible, evil people who they would never support or be friends with, even though they don't think it should be banned. The kind of speech libertarian who doesn't seem to see any problem with nazism at all would raise huge red flags, and verbal nazism is about a billion times less evil than deliberately killing a sentient child for a minor selfish reason.
I don't want to believe that people like you are sociopathic monsters. But unless you *did* mean to say that, given the "extreme assumption of life beginning at fertilization" abortion would be an act of horrific evil (in which case I applogise for calling you monstrous, but I'm baffled why you didn't make that explicit) then that's the only reading possible.
A person with anything resembling a conscience who thinks that a fetus is sentient would find the idea of an abortion (for a less-than-utterly-compelling reason) absolutely inconceivable.
There are fully sentinent children dying right now who are a match for your body parts. Not donating everything you can is an act of monstrous evil and selfishness. We need laws to make you donate blood and spare organs to save the dying children.
Yes, that's a fair argument and a discussion that needs to be had.
1. Saying "many people agree that this act X I might do is murderous and evil, but other acts that they do and think nothing of are actually just as murderous; therefore those should also be banned" is an entirely principled and compassionate argument. Saying the same but ending with "therefore, *I* should be free to commit murderous acts as well" is...so evil, so disgustingly and sociopathically selfish, that yes I can't think of an appropriate term for such a person other than "monster". I'm not saying you are saying the latter, but it certainly *looks* like you are, and my request for clarification that you're not was not answered so I don't know what else to conclude.
2. If you ARE arguing the former, then I have no problem with your position at all beyond practical details. Yes, refusing to donate an organ that you don't at all need (i.e. you wouldn't suffer health problems without it) to a person (let alone a child) who would die without it, and where you are the only person who can save them, for a trivial selfish reason like "I was hoping to get a promotion next month" or whatever the equivalent is to "I just want to have a lot of sex", would be monstrously selfish. And equivalent to the reasons for many or most abortions. (Doing so on the grounds that a disabled child should not live would be even more evil, and this literally describes one of the common, and *celebrated*, reasons for abortion).
I am sceptical that this describes many instances of organ-refusal; I think most people who refuse are either not convinced that giving up their organs won't harm them badly or kill them, have beliefs about being spritually harmed by doing so (especially in after-death donation) or are terrified of being subject to a medical procedure without their consent, without having done *anything* of their own to require it or justify it. I definitely support a right to refuse in these cases, just as I support exceptions for abortion for rape and serious health reasons. (Even though there are *still* a lot of differences between the two cases).
But if someone is terrified of having to go through a pregnancy, or believes that any pregnancy would harm them horribly, then they of course would not engage in a recreational act that has a high chance of causing pregnancy. (E.g. people who are terrifed or traumatised of drowning often don't even want to go near a boat that's on land!). If they do do that, then they are clearly *not* so terrified: if they then demand an abortion they are nothing but *entitled*, demanding to get everything they want regardless of the harms inflicted on another innocent being. (This doesn't apply to those are 100% convinced that a fetus posseses no sentience or consciousness whatsoever, and whose support for abortion rests *solely* on that; it's only those who think that isn't important who are entitled monsters).
> Yes, refusing to donate an organ that you don't at all need (i.e. you wouldn't suffer health problems without it) to a person (let alone a child) who would die without it, and where you are the only person who can save them, for a trivial selfish reason like "I was hoping to get a promotion next month" or whatever the equivalent is to "I just want to have a lot of sex", would be monstrously selfish. And equivalent to the reasons for many or most abortions.
Yes, this is pretty much the entire thing that triggered this whole subthread. I think at this point we are on almost exactly the same page. I completely agree the organ donation scenario described is monstrously selfish. And yet our laws permit it - our society consensus is that we may condemn that choice, but we do not forcibly prevent it being made; it is only pregnant girls that get the special treatment, and only while they are pregnant. Opinion in this specific space is incredibly strong and divisive; but only in this space. The moment the birth is registered, we're back in the "monstrous, selfish, but legally permitted" category when it comes to donating organs, even though the girl remains just as responsible for the baby's existence as she was a few seconds earlier. We have some laws about responsibility and negligence but these stop short of claims on the girl's body. She is not even required to breast feed - formula or a wet nurse or whatever is fine. Her life may be shot - no university for you, you're a full time nurse now! - her future may be ashes - but her body is once more inviolate. We have giant flaming arguments about abortion, but all the heat evaporates when it comes to organ donation; most people simply don't care much about saving lives that way.
Once we are at this point, then, consider that the law is a blunt instrument generally unable to deal with exceptional situations where a reasonable person might conclude that the law should not be applied, leading to kafkaesque outcomes such as teenage kids forced to give birth to their rapists' babies. Given that we seem to agree that there is no shortage of such situations - rapes, foetuses missing organs critical to life, foetuses endangering the mother by implanting in places other than the womb, etc etc - and also that in every other case but pregnancy, whatever we may ourselves think about the morality of the decision, we do in fact leave it up to the person and their doctor - I suggest we should do the same here.
In general I am in favour of fewer explicit laws governing human behaviour, especially in controversial situations where there is nuance and exceptions to be taken into account. For many laws in place and being considered, I do not believe we can sanely include enough exceptions to deal with the real world consequences of consistently enforcing them - reality is much better at coming up with terrible situations to put people in than people are at thinking of them ahead of time.
So when we single out one part of human experience and argue for laws that will end up forcing small groups of people into terrible situations when we don't feel particularly strongly about comparable cases that impact people more like us... I argue against such laws.
Hey, based on when you posted your comments, it looks like you never read my reply to you on Open Thread #322 until a couple of hours ago, but now that you have, please feel free to stop claiming that you've never seen a pro-choice advocate consider the well-being of the fetus/child.
I have, and I firmly consider (voluntary) abortion to be a lesser form of mercy-killing. Every abortion, every time. Any woman who is conflicted about having an abortion - wants a baby, but knows she can't adequately nurture it - and then has an abortion, has very literally committed an act of noble self-denial.
And every woman who has an abortion merely because pregnancy and parenthood would be inconvenient has (unwittingly) saved a child from a monster.
Please feel free to link to my argument for abortion as a means of preventing suffering:
"Hey, based on when you posted your comments, it looks like you never read my reply to you on Open Thread #322 until a couple of hours ago,"
I don't understand why you think that. I read your linked reply back then, and I wasn't sure how to respond to you raising a whole additional argument for abortion based not on sentience but still utilitarian and non-selfish. And the main thing I took from that comment was you describing my position as oddly emotional, which I admit it kind of is, and explaining the extent to which I still think it has a rational element (to the extent it's not already obvious) is not easy and would take a lot of thought on how to explain. So I let you have the last word there.
"please feel free to stop claiming that you've never seen a pro-choice advocate consider the well-being of the fetus/child."
I...don't *think* I ever said that. If I did appear to say that, it definitely wasn't intentional. Any utilitarian pro-choicer, for instance, is typically focused entirely on the well-being (or lack of being) of the fetus/child. I have some problems with utilitarians, but they are head-and-shoulders above most others when it comes to this.
What I've been saying is that *most* pro-choicers I've seen are not utilitarian and do not seem to mention or care about the fetus *at all*, given that they talk of *nothing* other than their own rights.
You are not an example of that (which I explicitly said in the linked thread further up) and neither is a utilitarian like Scott.
I've just now looked back over our conversation and you indeed were referring to a slightly different subset of pro-choicers than "all of them:" When I commented, I was in particular recalling this part:
> "Reading through pro-choice news articles and editorials, press releases from pro-choice groups, and statements from politicians, I'm waiting, and waiting and waiting, for them to just *mention*, just once, the presence of what many claim is a human child. And it's almost never mentioned or acknowledged at all."
I'm not a politician or professionally writing on the topic or representing a pro-choice group, but I believe I *am* expressing several views that most of them have but which are not strategically wise to say out loud.
Firstly and most importantly, advocating that abortion is a non-issue due to a fetus's lack of sentience invites philosophical and religious debates about sentience, the human soul, the value of human life, etc., etc. If people hold faith-based sentimental views about fetuses actually being precious children...
Ahem. I can never resist pointing out that if God exists, he is an abortionist of truly epic scale. Partly because it's funny, but mostly to bring visibility to the fact that *spontaneous abortion is an incredibly normal part of human life.* It's so, so, so normal! Induced abortion is just a drop in the bucket compared to all abortion, which is another reason to consider abortion in general a non-issue.)
...only emotional arguments about bodily autonomy are really going to have much of an impact.
Advocating that abortion prevents poverty and crime invites arguments about eugenics and the possibility of being called a Nazi. Etc.
Thus most pro-choice people choose stay on the much firmer ground of bodily autonomy, which pretty much everyone firmly agrees is good (except for the people who don't think women should have it during pregnancy), makes strategic sense. As Throwaway1234 has pointed out in many comments, "bodily autonomy except when pregnant" is a totally irrational and unfair double standard, so interrogating *only* that angle is a stronger position for most pro-choice folk than my unapologetic utilitarian position.
But I think it makes sense to assume that visible pro-choice folk share my position that abortion is a non-issue due to a lack of fetal sentience, and that most of them are probably somewhere along my spectrum of it being beneficial to both the pregnant woman and the (non-sentient, it can't be emphasized enough) fetus.
I hugely respect the discipline with how you've argued here, and to be candid, I am still so curious about why you care this much about this particular topic! Without going back over everything you've written across two different threads, my general impression was that you agree it's irrational to believe that fetuses have sentience, right?
That makes it a massive non-issue for me, so I'm surprised that your position over time has switched from pro-choice to pro-life (apparently mostly) due to the way pro-choicers argue their position. Why care if they don't care about the well-being of the "child?" *You* know there's no "child" in the true meaning of that word, so why is it so upsetting when they (almost certainly strategically) avoid mentioning said "child?"
I think there is a difference between a stranger needing a kidney and most pregnancies, in that in most pregnancies the woman plays an important role. I don't know how to estimate this, but 30% to 70% for ~70% of pregnancies sounds reasonable to me (but anyone is welcome to argue the numbers, it's what good about numbers, you can argue about them and move them). In that case, I think it's reasonable to expect a woman to take more responsibility for that act than for a stranger dying because their kidneys don't work.
There is a big imbalance in that again in most pregnancies a man is responsible too for it (I think in most and not all? But that "most" may be higher than the "most" for women) and can't lend his body to the baby like a woman can. I don't really know how law works when there is a physical difference like that and what is "fair" or good for a society in that case.
We're not talking about most pregnant women when we talk about abortion. Most pregnant women don't, thankfully, want an abortion. It is (almost) invariably an incredibly hard decision and does not come from a good situation. At the point when abortion is being considered, things have already gone terribly wrong. It is amazingly callous to presume that the decision comes on a whim due to lack of responsibility.
The woman is already in a place where the thing inside her is more like a stranger - e.g. where there was coercion, perhaps - or maybe a tumour - e.g. where it is known the child will not be viable or there are other medical problems with carrying it to term.
Being forced to donate their organs to a stranger against their will is not a bad analogy at all for what is going on to a great many women (and, tragically, underage girls) in a bunch of US states right now. In many cases it is more charitable than what is actually happening (consider e.g. the case of the women forced to carry anencephalic babies to term).
When you start arguing about responsibility, meanwhile, you are supporting my initial point: the debate isn't actually about the child any more. It's now about who deserves to be forced to carry it and who does not.
I don't know how representative they are, but they suggest that most common reason is financial, although I'd like to highlight that there are often multiple reasons, the surveys may not have all reasons listed and some reasons might be less hard to share than others.
I think the debate is still about the child because the idea here is to try to find a reasonable common ground where women are not forced to carry anencephalic babies to term while also reducing abortions. For example, if financial issues are so common, maybe financial aid could do something (new EA cause just dropped?).
I suspect free contraception, sex education, and perhaps even free vasectomies are actually the mosquito-net equivalents in this space.
Once you find yourself debating whether a woman's request for an abortion is worthy or whether she should have to carry to term, it is already too late - there is no good outcome to be had.
"It is amazingly callous to presume that the decision comes on a whim due to lack of responsibility."
The only charitable assumption is that you have never read anything a feminist has ever written on this topic. Feminists (and most pro-choicers generally, but especially them) are absolutely crystal clear that they support abortion for any reason whatsoever...or for none at all. Reasons like "to be sexually liberated" are explicitly endorsed, even celebrated, as valid reasons for abortion.
Do you know that laws prohibiting abortion only for the specific reason of *sex-selecting babies* (!) have been ruled unconstitutional by some US courts?
Do you know that abortion is frequently listed in progressive sex ed materials alongside condoms and pills as a valid form of *contraception*???
I generally agree with this argument, but it is muddied by the fact that the woman has some responsibility for the situation, by taking a course of action a reasonable person would have known would lead to pregnancy. The same moral reasoning is used to force the father to be financially responsible for the child - not exactly the same but I feel the calculus is much more similar than people currently are willing to admit.
...sure - except when the woman didn't actually choose that course of action, but got the effect anyway; failed birth control, lack of consent etc. The thing to notice here is that we are no longer talking about the foetus or what its potential future may be like - we are now talking about which women did something to deserve to be forced to carry to term and which did not (or did and have extenuating circumstances such as medical issues).
<i>Steelman: even with the most extreme assumption of life beginning at fertilization, there is still a debate to be had. This is because it is actually about who can and cannot be forced to donate organs by law against their will.</i>
If you're already pregnant, you've already donated your organs. The issue is whether you should be able to take them back at the cost of killing the person you donated them to.
I think it makes more sense to allow you to take back donated organs in your example than to allow abortion assuming fetuses are people. We can all agree that living longer is better than living shorter, so donating and taking back the organs is still better than not donating in the first place. But if you consider death inherently bad, living for a short time and then dying is worse.
> This is because it is actually about who can and cannot be forced to donate organs by law against their will.
There's a lot of major differences. The biggest one is responsibility. Nothing I did has any effect on you needing a kidney. But outside of rape, you can only get pregnant by your own actions. It's sort of like how if you see someone drowning in a river, you're legally allowed to just let them drown. But if you pushed them in, then if you let them drown it's murder.
Also, consider Kant's categorical imperative. Imagine a world where it's commonplace to have kids and then kill them/let them die, where there's a significant chance you'll die as a baby, vs one where you're not allowed to do that and, if you take risks that you know could result in you carrying a baby, you have to carry it to term. Clearly, being forced to choose between abstinence and risking being forced to carry a child isn't as bad as being killed.
Here's a better analogy.
Imagine you shoot someone in the kidney. They'll die unless they get a replacement. Also, the two of you share some very rare medical thing that means they can only survive if they can get your kidney specifically. In that case, should you be forced to give them your kidney? For example, could someone decide to charge you with murder, but only if that person dies, so if you don't give them a kidney you get punished?
Edit: This is also just something where people aren't always consistent. You gave an example where people decided not to switch the trolley, but there's also ones where they nearly universally do. Imagine someone thinks that, if it's beyond all reasonable doubt that a person is a murderer, they should lock that person up. Sure a system that does this will occasionally imprison innocent people, but if we have to imprison an innocent person to stop twenty or so murderers, it's still okay to do that. If there's someone who believes that, but that someone can't be forced to be pregnant for nine months to prevent a death, does that mean they're just claiming it's about bodily autonomy, but actually it's just about killing babies?
>Only when it comes to pregnant women, and this class of people _alone_, does the law require the woman to donate part of her body to preserve, however debatably, another life, regardless of her will.
Of course, this is _vastly_ less invasive than forced pregnancy, and the objective of the DNA sample is to aid the legal system, not to preserve a life (though if it results in a murderer being confined where they cannot commit additional murders, it might have that effect ).
Language is just a game & inferior is a bad move to play, it’s only meaning is as a move in a game so if it’s a bad move just don’t play it, simple as.
More people should study Wittgenstein, though I always thought AGI would emerge from a Wittgenstein-inspired GAN so maybe I’m wrong on that
>Stop playing the game of trying to define life and focus instead on "is our society better off if we agree to allow abortions before N weeks".
Likewise, stop playing the game of trying to define human rights and focus instead on "is our society better off if we just execute all the homeless people." So much easier!
Well, it seems like you think this is somehow a counter argument but you're proving my point very well. What would a society be like if it decided to execute homeless people? It would be a very scary place to live in, so maybe let's not execute homeless people?
Sounds like a much less scary place to live in: homeless people scare me all the time, I almost got mugged by one. It is not obvious that society would be "Scarier" if we rounded up the bums and executed them. They aren't exactly productive members of society.
Now I'm opposed to executing the homeless, because I play "language games" that include them being human beings, with rights and inherit dignity, and whose life is sacred.
Clearly you’re not trying to argue honestly. So I’m not my sure replying isn’t a complete waste of time, but I’ll try for the sake of other readers.
Deciding on moral issues only requires weighing the implications very carefully. There’s no need to resort to metaphysics because that just leads to dead ends when people’s intuitions don’t match. Executing poor people is clearly a policy that leads to a terrifying society. The precedent is dangerous and the criterion doesn’t match anyone’s moral intuition in a rawlsian sense. That’s why you don’t actually believe in executing poor people - not because some abstract definition of a word like “society” leads you to the conclusion deductively.
And in case you do actually believe it’s better to live in a society that arbitrarily executes people for the greater good, because you’re unable to follow logically the implication of such an arrangement, then you’re free be on the pro-execution side, and no one will sway you to the other side by telling you that God says you’re wrong or that the definition of the word “justice” proves you’re on the wrong side. Morality, in the absence of metaphysics, boils down to compromises between people with different value systems. Or war.
I am very much trying to argue honestly, and I don't believe it's better to live in a society that arbitrarily executes people *because* of my metaphysical beliefs. You can't excise the metaphysics and have a meaningful discussion about this, is my point. You saying that it's "clearly a policy that leads to a terrifying society" is just the same as my saying "human beings are made in the image of God and sacred" and claiming that one is metaphysical while the other is "only weighing the implications very carefully" is a false distinction, as the only way to weigh the implications is to bring metaphysical questions into it.
You really need to study Wittgenstein. If you can't see a difference between "executing people is scary" and "humans are sacred because of God" then you have a ways to go.
I most certainly do not. Again, Wittgenstein. You are the one still playing the essentialist language game. I’m just expressing a preference not to live in a society that executes people for being poor. And I’m not doing it out of any semantic argument over the meaning of any word. That’s the point. The values don’t emerge from the semantics. The semantics evolve over time to vaguely match the values, but there’s never a perfect match. The whole idea of words mirroring abstract concepts or pointing to them is the conception of early linguistic philosophy that the later LE demolished.
Well if that's all you want to do, then all well and good, but most people who bring up the subject of abortion don't just want to express an opinion, they want to make a point someone else might agree with, which means defining your terms.
But it's clearly not all you want to do, because the second FLWAB says they disagree with your conclusion you come back to claim they're lying and of course they must think it's scary, after all that's what you think. It's "clearly a policy that leads to a terrifying society", as opposed to the society that tolerates camps of drug addicts with nothing to lose. Then you talk about how useless it is to define "justice", when nobody said "justice" and both of us clearly said "human rights". You haven't weighed the implications carefully; you can't even follow the text.
You're not avoiding the game, you're just bad at it.
I kind of think our society would be better (at least at first level utilitarian analysis) if we withheld much of the ruinously expensive end of life care we provide now, and simply euthanize people who are too expensive to keep alive. But I'm pretty sure it simply is untenable because of the pesky reality that these are "living people"
I think we should allow more people to make their own end of life decisions. We have a right to life, and the state should absolutely defend that to the hilt; but faced with terminal decline, I fail to see that we should have an obligation to life, at least as far as far as the state is concerned.
I think making your aim "the good of society" leads to some pretty obvious risks. What if there's a terminally ill child with a high probability of dying, so that the overall expected value of their life is negative? What about a repeat criminal? What about someone too old to contribute to society?
What does society even mean? The nation-state? The race? Does the category of society also include foreigners, animals, nature, and people of future generations, or does it only include currently existing human citizens? I don't know if words like "good" or "society" are any easier to define than "life."
"Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation."
Scott, you are a utilitarian to whom this seems reasonable. You fit in the lizardman constant with respect to this.
Unless you're going to define away "reasonable person", I'd say that ignoring the lizardman constant, no reasonable person would preferentially give the parachute to Lance (though they might pick randomly and give it to him a rate of 50 percent). The fact that you think otherwise is because you're in a deeply weird bubble, just as when you said that marriage vows don't mean anything.
Also: Scott has young children! If Lance doesn’t have kids (it isn’t mentioned whether he does or not) I think almost anyone would give *Scott* the parachute in that situation.
Even if they didn't, you could probably find someone to claim that privileges people who have kids and devalues childfree people.
Seriously, I think most people would bop the other person over the head and take the parachute for themselves, then lie about it to rescuers. Who's going to notice more injuries on what's left of the other person after the crash?
> Seriously, I think most people would bop the other person over the head and take the parachute for themselves, then lie about it to rescuers. Who's going to notice more injuries on what's left of the other person after the crash?
They obviously wouldn't, reading about the details of any sudden, intense crisis (e.g. Titanic) would disabuse one of this notion. If people started betraying each other the moment they were put in a dangerous situation in order to escape, they would have been killed by the more powerful and cohesive rival tribe.
My understanding is that fewer men survived the Titanic because it was NOT that sudden. Ships that sink quickly tend to have more adult male survivors because they're physically capable of getting to safety.
~4% of the population is sociopathic, they'd do it. Some larger minority of selfish cowards with enough physical courage to do it, maybe. Most people, though? Nah. Most people have never killed anyone, how weird is that?!
> Even if they didn't, you could probably find someone to claim that privileges people who have kids and devalues childfree people.
No offense meant to you in particular but if you don't like that sort of reasoning and would prefer if it disappeared, don't bring it up and help it die in the shadows.
I figured with most antinatalist reasoning, ACX's readership is sufficiently pronatalist that mentioning a potential line of attack will help more opponents than supporters, and given the general naivete of many rationalists might be useful to bring it up.
I would not have brought it up in a more neutral or progressive forum.
Also I'm not really pronatalist or antinatalist--I'm fine with people who want kids having more, but I'm not into coercing people who don't want them into having them (given modern mores it will just lead to more child abuse), and I'm not having any myself for a variety of reasons (divorce risk, poor personality, and the hour having passed, briefly).
also, it only works because you're assuming additional people that aren't part of the equation! (the hypothetical people who Lance would help by being more charitable or whatever) If you pick a scenario that both Scott and Lance would survive, but once of them would suffer more (idk, one of them is going to get horribly sick but otherwise be okay), then there's no reason to prefer Lance
(in fact, you could easily set up the scenario to go the other way-- you have two people on a crashing plane: one of them is superior in nearly every way, including character -- they've already donated a kidney. Shouldn't you pick the one who still might be able to save someone's life, because they still have a kidney to donate?
"Another possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying?"
It's not so unsatisfying if you're not equal before the law. This is the kind of "equal" that's meant by the "all men are created equal" clause of the Declaration of Independence. It was considered kind of daring at the time.
Agreed that "Equal before the eyes of the law" was and is a very important and consequential principle. It's easy to take for granted in the first world today, but telling a medieval serf that they were equal to a Count in the eyes of the law would have been earth-shattering.
Indeed. It's so much taken for granted that you often see people assuming that the Declaration of Independence meant something else by "all men are created equal," and they mock it for advocating the absurdly false principle that everyone is equal in talents or physical attributes or something. Which is not what it's talking about at all.
I'm reminded of the observation in "The Bell Curve" that we must declare all people to be politically equal because they are obviously unequal in pretty much all other dimensions. If we were all clones of each other, nobody would bother to declare us all politically equal.
(What they didn't do was attempt to discern why societies with the principle of political equality seem to have a competitive advantage over other societies.)
I am once again begging Americans to read up on the philosophical views that went into their own damn country's founding. "All men are created equal" refers to men in the state of nature. Equality before the law *recognises* this fact; it doesn't *create* it.
A distinction without a difference. All are equal before the law is the point we're discussing because it's the one that Scott brought up, and it's true -because- they were created equal in the state of nature. The very statement says it: "All men are -created- equal." Created! There's no conflict here between the points being made.
Since nobody in comments was arguing the latter (it says "created" right in the text), that's a nullity of an objection. Maybe Scott was thinking so, but everyone here agreed it was more important than that.
Hi, Alexander. Any possibility of you writing a critical analysis of coaching vs classical therapy? I'm a psychotherapist who started a new job in coaching and I feel very conflicted as it's very different to what I am used to, I'm wondering if you also explored this topic at some point in your life.
My own hunch is, like, that "inferiority" doesn't matter. Yes, you can be inferior in all kinds of ways to all kinds of other people or things, but your value is still higher than your negative value, and as such you are still, well, valuable.
Lance might be better than me in all kinds of ways, but I do remember that 20th century poem, and I made a post analyzing it, or maybe a mixup of it, and now more people know about the poem and grew to love it as well. If I didn't exist, there would be nobody to do that, even if Lance is better than me.
Some great altruism figure that organizes charities and stuff might save ten thousand people a day. I donate $50 a month on malaria nets and save 1 person a month. But if I didn't do that, that person would be dead, and he sure is very grateful to the fact that I also exist, in addition to Lance
I'm not a signed up Nazi party member but I don't have a problem with doing something subtle and sustained about ridding the gene pool of the influences that result in 1% of humans becoming the psychopaths that cause 99% of humanity's problems. Psychopaths do far more harm and cause far more suffering than any other mental illness if you consider the total impact that one has during their lifetime, perhaps more harm than all other genetic illnesses combined. Then again, what could possibly go wrong?
I assure you, most atrocities in the world have been commited by perfectly mentally healthy people --, after all it's not like the human brain isn't inherently wired for evil, which is always more effectly prevented by lack of opportunity rather than lack of desire. Do you think nazi germany or japan, for example, had a extremely high number of psychopaths at one point? People of all moral ideologies just do evil shit all the time when they have the opportunity to so due to self-interest or to obey authorities.
Correct, but it isn't entirely that simple, I think the scale of "evil" will be greatly lessened, but we would still see random acts of stupidity on an interpersonal level that one could label as "evil". What I hope we would see less of is young people being conscripted and forced to go and murder their cousins in horrendous ways, as per the current madness in the Ukraine.
For a while. Ultimately though the temptation from doing stuff like that becomes too great. And ideologies like nationalism, socialism, etc. can convince lots of people to do bad things who aren't actual psychopaths because it's beneficial for the race, the country, etc....
"ideologies" don't operate without people at their core driving them one way or another, see my comment elsewhere r.e. the small number of psychopaths required to nudge a large number of useful idiots in one direction or another.
Putin is the tip of a pyramid. He cannot mobilise the country on his own: the pyramid must comply, and the relevant parts of it - especially at the top - have therefore been carefully purged of all who neither share his goals nor can convincingly pretend to do so.
If you assassinate him, he will be replaced by the next identical pillock down the pyramid, and it is unclear whether the result will be better or worse. You'd have to replace a good chunk of at least the upper levels of the pyramid; which, to be fair, the Russians are not historically shy about doing; however the outcomes of doing that have not, by and large, been great for them.
If you shake a bucketful of pebbles, the bigger ones rise to the top. It's an emergent property of the physics of how these objects interact with each other.
If you have a sufficiently large number of humans trying to exist in proximity to each other, those more willing to cause others suffering to further their own goals will rise to the top of the emerging hierarchies. It's an inevitable property of how humans interact with each other.
Spending time around flocks of children will prove this is false. There's not a child in the world that doesn't try to lie to their parents at some point.
I am a home educator and have five children. I know exactly what children are like. Telling lies is in isolation not an indicator of much at all. However some children may manifest such behaviour at pathological levels, then that would be an indicator that they have cognitive differences. 1% is still a lot of people.
I think the normal violent thug/axe murderer type evil is a different phenomenon than ethnic cleansing/death camp type evil. You might get rid of a lot of the first by removing the most sociopathic and violently inclined from the genepool, but you wouldn't do much about the second kind. That's a social phenomenon that doesn't require weird people to operate. I don't think the median US soldier herding the Cherokee along the Trail of Tears was an especially terrible human, for example, even though he was engaged in something pretty terrible.
Name one organisation, political group, or religion etc. that didn't eventually get taken over by psychopaths. Then explain what went wrong with all of the rest of them, what was lacking in their organisational immune system that allowed psychopaths to infiltrate their cohort then work their way up to the levels with real power. I do not believe that the average human is inherently evil by nature, I do believe that perhaps a majority of people are useful idiots who are easily controlled by psychopaths though. What makes you think that the halls of power in most countries, including Japan, are any less infested with psychopaths today? I'd suggest that only their modus operandi has become more sophisticated. Claiming to subscribe to a "moral" ideology, when you really just see it as a tool to manipulate those who genuinely do, is yet another of the tricks in the psychopath's playbook.
>Name one organisation, political group, or religion etc. that didn't eventually get taken over by psychopaths.
I've read estimates that 3% of CEOs are psychopaths. This is higher than the (IIRC) 1% in the general population, but it is still far less than 100%. Granted, the 3% is presumably an equilibrium figure, where any business has existed for finite time. How much of the difference do you intend the "eventually" in your statement to cover? Also, do you expect that once an organization gets headed by a psychopath, that they never get replaced by a non-psychopath?
Keep in mind that political and religious organisations can last for centuries, and companies are just part of the picture.
As for if psychopaths are more likely to hand the baton over to other psychopaths, I don't know if their is any research on that but one could take into consideration the toxic environment they create and if psychopaths are better adapted to it, so they tend to accumulate in the top of hierarchies waiting to move into higher positions.
Many Thanks! Odd about the large difference between the old number that I recall and the 21% (thanks very much for the link!). Chalk it up to the replication crisis? 21% would still leave 79% of businesses lead by _non_-psychopaths.
>The meta-analytical results obtained allow us to estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%. That being said, this rate varies depending on the participants' sex (higher in males), the type of sample from the general population (higher in samples from organizations than in community samples or university students), and the type of instrument used to define psychopathy. In fact, using the PCL-R, which is currently considered the “gold standard” for the assessment and definition of psychopathy, the prevalence is only 1.2%.
Aargh!, nearly a 4X discrepancy in the two measurements. :-(
>As for if psychopaths are more likely to hand the baton over to other psychopaths, I don't know if their is any research on that but one could take into consideration the toxic environment they create and if psychopaths are better adapted to it, so they tend to accumulate in the top of hierarchies waiting to move into higher positions.
Well, alternatively, a power-seeking psychopath might want to minimize potential competitors. Many a dictator has spent time coup-proofing their subordinates.
Well all I can say is that is an under researched area and I am trying to avoid assumptions about how things really operate in large organisations, however based on personal observations (acknowledged weak evidence) there are hierarchies formed within large organisations that mirror the organisational structure but exclude most people, cronyism, and that is where we see a concentration of cooperating high functioning psychopaths at multiple levels, therefore you math above is off as it does not count the aspirational dictators amongst the ranks of the up an coming psychopaths who are innately good enough at game theory to know how to cooperate with those who are ultimately their biggest threats.
Psychopaths/sociopath can have their uses, too. Thus less like "cystic fibrosis", more sickle-cell - and not just one-gene, thus there is a spectrum, too. For a look from the other side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatsGU5UKQ You can skip the first 20 minutes
True, much has been suggested about surgeons (and certain other professions), but are those useful one's irreplaceable?
Pegrum, J., & Pearce, O. (2015). A stressful job: Are surgeons psychopaths? The Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 97(8), 331-334. doi: 10.1308/rcsbull.2015.331
Try replacing surgeons ;) - even a good nurse these days is hard to find, so please be gentle with those psychopaths ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx9qUR9P2ZQ (pointless music video, but do watch the other of James Fallon, PhD: The Psychopath Inside
My wife has a medical degree and a masters degree in nursing on top of that, yep she is a Doctor Nurse Practitioner (who is a lifelong yoga practitioner too), and my brother in law is in fact a surgeon.
The point of logic one should note is that it may help some people in their surgical profession to have psychopathic traits but I have not seen research that suggests that they all do or that it is necessary or even significantly advantageous, it is simply that a trend has been noted in some professions.
Right. If we got rid of them all it might improve things for a while but everyone would be super vulnerable to the first one to appear via random mutation.
Plus you'd probably have knock-on effects like everyone becoming even more risk-averse than they already are. Or the human population would drift in the direction of autism and the Astral Codex Ten comment page would take even longer to load than it already does.
I recall a discussion on, I think, Econtalk, about the ratio of sociopathy. The fewer there are, the more advantage there is to being one, but the more there are, the less advantage there is to being one.
(Plenty of signed-up Nazi members would just increase that 1% to 2...sorry, I read frogtwitter.)
I don't think it's a yes-no gene. You'd get the moderately psychopathic people who didn't meet your 1% cutoff for extermination rising to positions of influence, and then being more psychopathic as it would pay off with the increasingly sheeplike general population.
Being psychopathic is a good idea if nobody else is. Lots of non-psychopaths fantasize about being psychopaths--look at murderhobos in tabletop RPGs.
My "something subtle and sustained" is incompatible with your "extermination" context, I'm not going there, nor did I ever imply that it is a single gene involved. The (you are either a sheep or a wolf) argument is a false dichotomy, the intelligent and well informed Libertarian does not fit into that structure at all.
My best guess is given the lower rate of religion among autism, it's probably (negatively) correlated with whatever determines your position on the spectrum. (You're attributing external events to a deity, i.e. engaging in a false-positive theory of mind.) More autists is bad for women, because (a) autists, of whom the vast majority are male, are bad with women and tend to develop resentment toward them or in general tend not to consider their point of view because they are close to fewer of them (b) if society tends in an autistic direction, it will be bad for women overall because they will shape society in ways that benefit them at women's expense (look at Silicon Valley).
> (b) if society tends in an autistic direction, it will be bad for women overall because they will shape society in ways that benefit them at women's expense (look at Silicon Valley).
OK CHRIST ina good luck with that, finding single genes. and a new name. :-)
This may inform your future opinions,
Dewhurst K, Beard AW. Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. British Journal of Psychiatry. 1970;117(540):497-507. doi:10.1192/bjp.117.540.497
Perhaps one should consider if there is a difference between spirituality and religiosity, and that neither require organised religion to function. Psychopaths exploit religious hierarchies, because they are social hierarchies. They fein religiosity in that context, they will fein polarised political or social views if their target hierarchy is based on that.
You need to look at it more abstractly, the structures and control influences that exist in human societies.
Well, first, neither psychopathy nor the capacity for spiritual experience/belief are single genes, obvs.
My single sentence was intended to be a slightly flippant commentary that if we were noodling around with people's genes / brains on a near-magical level, it would be better to remove the inclination to believe in the unbelievable than to remove the capacity to choose when to be empathic.
Many psychopaths are high-functioning, productive members of society who are simply governed by forces other than empathy. I'd rather have them than people who make choices based on the unknown and unknowable.
What if the intervention was as simple as women who have a psychopathic brother never having a child. The X chromosome carries a lot of genes associated with brain function and metabolism. This is why we have X-linked disorders, mostly suffered by males and involving some form of cognitive impact. It stands to reason then that there are also X-linked advantages to be had too.
As for your issue with religion (?), what makes you think that those people abusing religion to justify their inhumanity actually believe in anything anyway, what if they are just manipulative psychopaths who use the hierarchy of a religion to gain power/influence over others in ways not greatly different from how they achieve the same within political groups?
My issue isn't with religion, it's with the individual capacity to experience and believe in a supernatural entity / force.
While all people have some cognitive biases, faith is about *preserving* irrational ideas no matter what evidence is presented to refute them. It's about explicitly rejecting one's capacity to change one's position when provided sufficient evidence or argument.
That can be explained as just a side effect of some people's faith directed behaviour, it is not what faith is. Look we are all living in an illusion, no matter how smart you think you are, how logical, because at the end of the day even our most rational system of thought, mathematics, is self-referential, Kurt Gödel proved that.
Faith exists as a cognitive function because it is evolutionarily advantageous. Natural selection doesn't care about anything but that which impacts on reproductive fitness.
So why do people believe in things? To fill the void we call the "unknowable" so that they can act rationally (within that system) and make decisions in conditions of high uncertainty. Faith is not about rejecting the scientific method because science doesn't even attempt to try and fill that unknowable void, at best it tries to map its boundaries. There is no conflict between those cognitive systems, they serve different purposes. This is why so many great 20th century scientific minds were also people of faith.
If you are talking about theologies in particular, not all religions are, then we need to consider what is in fact knowable and provable about people's faith based world views. Can we prove that God exists, and can we prove that God does not exist? No in both cases as we cannot even define what "God" is (only a god-like mind could), we can't make a logical statement about the question based on evidence. Nor can we be lazy and say you can't prove X is true therefore X is definitely not true.
Another interesting aspect of religiosity is that it seems to be associated with a lower incidence of depression.
Svob, C., & Weissman, M. M. (2019). The role of religiosity in families at high-risk for depression. Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 9, 1-6. doi: 10.1016/j.jemep.2019.03.00
Psychopaths aren't what you think they are, and most dictators probably aren't psychopaths. Actual psychopaths are pretty easy to spot and can't function all that well in normal society, so they normally don't rise very far outside of really weird and extreme circumstances (eg. Prigozhin *might* have been a psychopath but probably wasn't; Putin frankly isn't).
What you're thinking of is just callousness, which is probably a normal psychologically health response to situations which call for it.
(Of course, plagiarism is often a warning sign, and there may be other problems with the paper. But the retraction alone doesn't disqualify the paper as evidence if it seems to hold up otherwise.)
> I'm not a signed up Nazi party member but I don't have a problem with doing something subtle and sustained about ridding the gene pool of the influences that result in 1% of humans becoming the psychopaths that cause 99% of humanity's problems.
Good thing you opened with the defense that you aren't in a Nazi party, otherwise your argument would be indistinguishable from Nazi lingo. Then again, not being "a signed up nazi party member" is not exactly the most bullet-proof defense of all time, if what you really wanted to say was that you don't share Nazi views or values. You certainly do seem to approve of certain Nazi methods.
I think you need to work on your delivery then, your comment did not read like a joke at all. And I'm not sure who you mean with "the rest of the audience" either - none of the replies so far, save one maybe, read like a joke reply either.
Absolutely. But if you're the comedian here, then that makes me the heckler, so if you choose to engage, you can't just call it quits like that. Also, if you wanna go pro as a comedian, I'd advise you to not quit your day job just yet.
Another angle would be getting explicit about how different ways of thinking one's capacity affect one's life. "I do what I can with what I've got" might lead to better outcomes than identifying with one's place in a hierarchy.
Strongly agree. "I do what I can" might (and does) sometimes lead to better outcomes, but also might (and does) lead to worse outcomes. But for whom, and at what cost? Good to be explicit about that.
I imagine a version of that meme with the crowd "who wants X" vs "who wants to do X", with the crowd acclaiming the proposition "who wants to be treated better than their actual usefulness" vs "who wants to live in a society that has collapsed due to no longer treating people according to their usefulness".
I've been playing with the ideal that (ideal) liberalism is about recognizing that treating all people as valuable pays off in some ways and (ideal) conservatism is better at recognizing that there's work which needs to be done and some people are better at it than others.
No one would willingly give their child cystic fibrosis genes. This seems clear. Should we say that such genes are inferior, or that persons with those genes are genetically inferior? That has so many more connotations being dragged along in the background.
Is there a phrase that we could use instead that lacked the ugly baggage, but still expressed the idea that genes that cause suffering and untimely death without any obvious counterweight seem tragic if due to luck and cruel if the result of intent?
If the issue is that genetically inferior sounds right-wing then couldn’t we use leftist-coded language for the worse off to replace it like Genetically Disadvantaged, Genetically Marginalised, or Genetically Underprivileged?
Or maybe the genetically bit could go too, Mutationally, Allelically, Hereditarily, Genomically, or DNA Variationally ?
It's not about "discarding" anyone, any more than working to end generational poverty is about 'discarding' the poor. In both cases the point is to protect the next generation from suffering under the same burdens.
Embryos, yeah, but not people. For the political tribe we're talking about, I don't think the objection is usually based on concern for the embryos themselves.
> If the issue is that genetically inferior sounds right-wing then couldn’t we use leftist-coded language for the worse off to replace it like Genetically Disadvantaged, Genetically Marginalised, or Genetically Underprivileged?
No, because when the meaning of a term is bad, the term automatically becomes pejorative.
I suppose I might ask you: why do you suppose the U.S. legal system has decided not to disprivilege you vs. Lance?
(Or, more generally, not to do this to anyone — to have no nobles, no gentry... no class that, it has been decided, are worth more than the rest.)
Is it all down to practical considerations? All based on the fact that it would be too hard to tell who is superior every time, or perhaps on the basis that it makes everyone get mad a lot?
I don't think so. Not that there couldn't be really dumb philosophical principles enshrined in law, I mean — just using the question to try to get at the intuition about whether that would be *desirable*, even if perfectly possible.
I think there *is* a moral sense for which most people are worth more or less the same. I'll have to think about it more to fully justify it, probably, but I'd say "something something good-hearted something something capacity to love, to feel happy, something, suffers just as much as, something."
If it's just hard to tell who's superior but you can get it right 51% of the time, it would still be worth considering it. The problem is that it's too easy for the people in power to say they're the ones that are superior.
A good point, perhaps. I'm not sure most people would like to make the judgment based on ability, though — classic example here would be, like, Shirō Ishii, or something.
(...you know my first instinct was to name a different WW2 doctor, but I'm trying to buck the tradition, here—)
> U.S. legal system has decided not to disprivilege you vs. Lance?
...has it, though? It is a more complex question than "the laws are the same for everyone" if some categories of people predictably end up with very different outcomes from the exact same laws. Take, for instance, the old adage, "if the punishment is a fine, it's only illegal for poor people" - same law, but one class of people end up in jail (because they can't pay the fine) while another just need to decide whether the thing they want to do is worth the money.
It can be argued re: which is the closer to "all are equal before the law", between 1) "all receive the same punishment" and 2) "all receive different punishments, but ostensibly the same hardship", true.
However, even disregarding considerations such as...
• "doesn't introducing another discretion-amenable variable make it more, and not less, likely that people will be treated differently?"—...
—...or:
• "is the fine solely to punish, or is there some calculus here wherein you have literally 'paid your debt' if you paid the ticket, making it thereby unreasonable to amend the fine based purely on inconvenience-to-perp?"—...
— even disregarding these, it seems to me that the *intent* is still fairly clear; that's how the principle is explicitly justified, even, AFAIK: levying the same penalty for the same crime upon one and all is *meant* to display no preference for one citizen over another.
(And as long as that's the intent, I think the [...vague gesture at an] argument I made to Scott remains cogent! I'm not married to defending the U.S. criminal justice system or anything — just my thoughts on the objection you floated, 'sall, and not like some cornerstone of the case — so to speak.)
-------------------------------------
Actually, thinking about it a bit more, I might argue that even the *effect* can be framed as self-adjusting-to-approximate-fairness:
→ Suppose Person A is made extremely anxious by interactions with LE, and Person B doesn't mind so much really — ought we give Person B a harsher punishment so that they're just as upset as A?
I say:
→ Probably not: both for A) obvious practical purposes, and B) because we all have our own tolerances for risks like "possibility of being fined for speeding"...
...and, hence, it is maybe a feature rather than a bug that we may all adjust our behavior such that we end up pulled over a personally-commensurate amount.
(...or else we just have real poor risk-evaluation ability — which resulting extra hardship is, perhaps, its own just punishment...)
We do have, legislatively speaking, an upper class of politicians and bureaucrats, to whom the laws apply differently; obvious example is that it is a separate and more serious charge to kill Feds of various flavors than citizens. Another one: Feds can fly armed on commercial airplanes, even ones who are not law enforcement.
Is this a privilege given to the *person,* or to the *position?*
I'd argue there's a difference, in terms of whether we're thereby attributing greater *personal worth* or merely distributing *practical job-enabling legal tools* — much like e.g. the power-plant doesn't let most people into crucial and/or dangerous areas, but does allow some; it is not the policy of the plant that employees with greater access are a superior class of person, though!
(Not that it matters, in terms of the main thrust of my initial comment, I think — whether the U.S. lives strictly up to the ideal is less the point than if the example is pointing [heh] at some I-assume-fairly-common intuition about the difference between being better-at-stuff and being worth-more-as-a-human-being [heh heh... okay, those aren't even really puns, I deserve no chuckles I know–].)
I think another important meaning of "equality" is just that you aren't prejudged -- that your actions are judged the same as if anyone else had done them. People aren't split into nobles and peasants where the former are just considered *inherently* better and more deserving, regardless of their actual actions.
Personally I'd call this more "orthogonality" than "equality" -- it doesn't really mean that people are inherently equal (even though people often phrase it that way); rather it means that people *aren't* inherently *unequal* because what it's really saying is that inherence *doesn't exist*, only action. But "equality", confusingly, is what people call it.
There was an old Aella post on this topic, but it was on her old blog and I can't find it anymore. Hopefully it still exists somewhere!
I accept the theoretical validity of your hypothetical superior Lance, but in practice you've ignored the significant problem of measurement accuracy. I believe that if you choose two people at random it's unlikely that you'll be able to state which is inferior, because there are so many dimensions to assess, and so many confounds (see e.g. Trading Places). There are exceptions----Trump is clearly inferior to just about everyone I know personally---but I think those are rare.
I also think that the rate exceptions are not a problem. It's healthy to look up to certain superior people as role models.
He even had one quoting SSL-readers personal ! experiences with DT. All were positive. (If so can help me find that post in the SSL archives, please?) Disclosure: Scott and me are very much contra Trump - just not because he is inferior/worse compared to usual Americans but to usual US-presidents at that job.
That's a big part of it. He definitely has the common touch, which is a huge asset for any politician, and becomes a lot more valuable when institutional trust is low.
I mean, would you say elites *haven't* screwed the average American?
Or, hear me out, we could train our brains not to feel depressed when finding out there's somebody better than us. I'm not saying it's practical to do this with the journalists, for the first case, but the latter seems not only manageable, but also part of what should be basic education.
I notice that often when I think something I also mentally add a number of caveats that are almost subliminal. If I met Lance I could mostly feel that he's my superior, but on parallel threads I might remind myself that it's normal and not something to be depressed about, that I may be seeing him in a good moment and don't have a full image of his (private?) life, that he probably had contextual and genetic advantages I did not and so on. Occasionally one such thread may get bumped up to full awareness and get me to actually feel an emotion - say Lance is my old schoolmate with no obvious advantages over me - in which case yeah, I'd feel a bit shitty and I see no reason I shouldn't. Or maybe a thread will remind me that I'm seeing him on instagram so I should take it with a ladle-full of salt.
I don't think this a particularly difficult skill. I'm pretty sure kids and many teenagers don't have it, and I've heard therapy terms that sound like not having it is a problem, but I think it's much better to try and find ways of coping with reality ("Lance is my superior") rather than reframing it into a more palatable way.
It's possible (this is very conjectural) that people generally don't mind inequality if they're expecting it. People generally don't mind inequality in the workplace, not that many people get particularly riled up about inherited wealth and basically no-one minds differences in athletic ability. My guess would be that people don't link losing competitions, and in intelligence, personal success and (possibly?) attractiveness, we insist throughout everyone's childhood that they're all equal and all good at these things, and slowly slipping behind other people in their adult life feels like constantly losing [a competition/what you thought you had].
I think the egalitarianism of American society makes this harder. Nobody's *supposed* to be better than anyone else, even though of course someone always is.
>Or, hear me out, we could train our brains not to feel depressed when finding out there's somebody better than us.
Agreed. My point of view is that:
There are 8 billion of us.
Even if there are a thousand different qualities on which we could be ranked, the odds of winding up as the "best" on _any_ of those qualities is 1 in 8 million.
Forget it. Almost no one is going to win every competition, even on a single quality, but the median result, at least in 1st world nations, is reasonably decent.
"inferior" implies some sort of ranking, and there is no fixed ranking applicable to all cases, and sometimes no ranking at all, depending on the situation. So the term is not very useful by itself, only relative to a situation where a certain kind of ranking matters.
For example, for cystic fibrosis instead of "inferior" we can just say "less adapted to life", without implying a fixed ranking in all situations (people with cystic fibrosis sure get triaged first in ER).
Yes, this!. Better and worse, superior and inferior, all are dependent on the purpose and the environment. Sickle-cell and malaria prevalence is another good example.
I think the sense in which the "inferior" in "you are not inferior to anyone" is used in is obvious. You are not *ethically* inferior to anyone. Lance gets a parachute over Scott because Lance is *more practically useful*, but Scott doesn't *deserve* to live less than Lance does; if two tools are destroyed but one is useless and another is worth millions nobody would weep for the useless tool, but the death of a wholly useless man is a tragedy in itself and no less of a tragedy in itself than the death of an immensely useful one (separately from the loss of value caused by it).
I think there's something here that other comments are brushing up against that's also related to the Veil of Ignorance or Categorical Imperative or something.
E.g.: under a Good decision rule you have equal "rights" (i.e., in a broader sense than just US legal rights) because, yes, under the inside view you might want to save one person more than the other, but outside view you don't know who you would be.
1. All of Scott's weaknesses are by the grace of the lord, so we feel less inferior. (Except it does not work on/for/to/with me. I can't even do prepositions properly).
2. Jokes: a) the smbc about one of those "two exceptions":
b) parachutes: A small airplane is about to crash. There are 3 passengers on board: Trump, the pope and a school boy. But only 2 parachutes.
Donald Trump said: "I am the smartest President ever in American history , so my people don't want me to die." He took the first pack and jumped out of the plane.
Pope Francis said to the 10 year old schoolboy: " My son, I am old and don't have many years left, so I let you have the last parachute." The boy said , " That's okay , Your Holiness, there's a parachute left for you. America's smartest President ever took my schoolbag."
It was popular in Germany with Georg Bush jr., I recall (without the "smartest ever"). It is probably much older - it sure does exist in many versions (4 and 5 passengers, known names and professions). I do consider Trump the perfect impersonation. Boys will be boys and popes will be popes.
I feel like it works better with Bush Jr and especially Trump--the person has to have a reputation for either being dumb or impulsive. I feel like Gates would have recognized the parachute.
I disagree. The joke only really works when the person has an unearned reputation for intelligence. But it definitely works so long as it is a person you dislike.
One thing to note when adding up multiple traits of value is that usually traits are scored in a basically logarithmic manner, either because human perception is logarithmic or because the sampling procedures used for psychometric measurement tends to favor logarithmic scaling.
(E.g. the relationship between IQ and success on difficult tasks, or between IQ and income, tends to be ~exponential. And if you ask people to estimate the frequency they engage in a type of behavior, they can reasonably well estimate its order of magnitude, and the frequencies for e.g. crying or masturbation or drinking will be ~lognormally distributed.)
If you add together a bunch of logarithms, then you multiply together their linearly scaled distributions. This ends up measuring something that you can intuitively think of as "well-roundedness", whereas if you imagine that Actual Value is a linear function of the final non-logarithmic measures, then it doesn't capture Actual Value very well because the lognormal distributions will have a few crazy outliers that determine most of the value.
If you actually want to rank people by value while considering these dynamics, often a better approach is to consider their most extreme traits and equate their overall value with the value of those traits, because the logarithm of a sum is approximately equal to the maximum of the logarithms.
As a very minor note on CF, those lifespan estimates are generally outdated due to much better treatment protocols, the 300k a year drug definitely works for the most common mutation, but there are multiple types of mutation on that gene and they don’t all express the borked protein in the same way.
"Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation."
Uh, no, what the hell are you talking about?
I don't think that way at all. I think it's a bit weird that you do, and extremely weird that you think everyone else does.
By the way, you don't have to dig for trivialities to make yourself better than Lance at something. Nobody can write this blog better you do, and that's not trivial at all.
Situations like that abound; most parents are the best parents their children could ever have, even if they're not that good at parenting, because you can't just swap out a parent like a car part. I don't know anything about your personal relationships but I really doubt everyone you know and love would prefer to have Lance in your place.
I think the issue is that an unqualified "superior" doesn't just mean "more valuable in every way" but "more valuable from everyone's point of view".
And regardless of Lance's many virtues, there will always be at least one person to whom I am more valuable than Lance, and that's me. Everyone else might value Lance more than they value me, but I value my own existence at infinity, so nobody will ever be more valuable than me in that sense. (I also value my wife and kids at infinity, before anyone asks.)
This, I think, is the central objection to describing people as superior or inferior to others -- everyone has the right to their own value system in which they, and the people they love, matter more than everyone else.
As others have highlighted, I think the issue is what you measure when assessing if one is superior to another. People with low IQ might be much happier than people with high IQ - in which way they should be considered inferior? They're literally living more fulfilling lives.
I often think the LessWrong diaspora resorts far too readily to "status" in its explanations for social phenomena, and perhaps Scott's post here is deliberately avoiding recourse to a word that can provoke a lot of eye-rolling. But the obvious solution to the puzzles here seems to be: "Duh, it's all about status!"
Evolution has given us strong emotional responses to status hierarchies and status threats, because such hierarchies were decent proxies for survival and reproductive success. The result was that humans ended up caring more about status than about actual survival or reproduction. (This why people are willing to sacrifice their lives in battle or become celibate monks.) When you call someone inferior, the problem isn't that you "think they’re less than human and maybe want to kill them." The problem is that by calling them inferior, you have already done something *worse* than killing them.
Why is "genetic inferiority" a particularly serious status threat? A full response to this question would take several books, but the short explanation is that modern western culture has substituted "DNA" for "the soul" in its thinking about individual essences. To call someone "inferior" is an insult; to call them "genetically inferior" is an insult *sub specie aeternitatis*.
I think your reply gets to the bottom of this dilemma.
Calling someone ‘inferior’ drags in all kinds of bad ideas about status from the past whether they are relevant or not. We need to figure out which ideas are relevant and which should be discarded.
If we admit that the person with cystic fibrosis who will likely die next week is inferior, we are admitting that certain genetic differences are inferior which is admitting that certain races are inferior and that can't be right because slavery was bad. There's a leap of logic somewhere along the chain that is invalid. Where is it?
Taking the ‘one parachute’ case, would we give the parachute to the person with CF? Or the healthy person? What about the place on the lifeboat? What about if the COVID ward is full and we need to decide who should get the last ventilator?
As a society, we absolutely did decide that people with certain genetic and/or physical conditions should get preference for a ventilator and appropriately so, IMO.
‘Status’ and ‘superiority’ used to mean one thing but now they mean something else. We need to discard the old meanings and decide what they mean to us now. The words (and the ideas they represent) are not intrinsically bad.
Same argument in a different dimension: given a choice between Lionel Messi (or Michael Jordan or Richard Feynman or Beethoven) in their prime or Joe Schmo, who should have the nicest house?
In our society (and approximately every society that ever existed) we would give the nicest house to Messi. In an honest world we would say that Messi deserves the nicest house because he is better (that is, more valuable to society). But there is a taboo against saying someone is better because, in the old days, saying that someone was better than someone else justified slavery and slavery is bad.
Ideas about status are tied up in ancient debates about race that are no longer relevant because race is no longer relevant. We should discard those ancient debates and think about what is relevant to us.
I don't think talking about what people "deserve" is going to help resolve the problems Scott discusses here. Talking about what people deserve is among the habits that gave rise to these problems in the first place.
What's a better word? Entitled? Allowed under the law? Stole?
I think “deseve” only has negative connotations because of injustices that happened long ago. "Deserve" is a perfectly good concept and a perfectly good word.
Scott and many commenters here lean towards consequentialism in their moral thinking, so they don't really see desert as a basic moral category. If Alice thinks people can genuinely "deserve" certain rewards or punishments, while Bob thinks the concept of desert is just a potentially useful heuristic that can allow us to reach good outcomes via a system of rewards and punishments, it's easy for miscommunication to result.
(I think part of Scott's puzzlement here arises from his difficulty understanding the commitments of people who think in terms of desert, because he doesn't see how those commitments can be made logically consistent. I would agree, but I think the appropriate response is to recognize that for many people, logical consistency in moral thinking is a secondary concern at best.)
I'm a consequentialist and I agree with Bob. Rewarding people who deserve it results in those people doing more things that deserve higher rewards. I think Alice is mistaken.
My guess is that Scott is not puzzled at all and he is asking these questions to tease out the differences between Alice and Bob.
> In our society (and approximately every society that ever existed) we would give the nicest house to Messi.
That's not actually true.
In approximately every society that ever existed, including our own, people in a position to give away houses overwhelmingly give them away to their kids (or other family members) who are vastly more important to them than any public figure.
Which isn't to say Messi might not end up with the nicest house in the neighborhood, but that's solely because he's aggregating small values across a vast number of people.
Joe Schmo is a lot more important to his friends and family than Messi ever will be, but there's only so much wealth that they have at their disposal to show this appreciation.
Messi, on the other hand, is only marignally important to the majority of people who care about him at all, but there are many times more of them than folks who care about Joe Schmo.
If you're worth only $1 each to a million people, you've suddenly got a million dollars. At the same time, each of those people have people who are vastly more important to them than you are, but they don't have a million dollars to give away.
If you use a very narrow interpretation of the word “give” you might have a point. But I am sure you understood that I intended a broader definition that says Messi gets the best house because society wants him to have the best house.
The first society says it will give out houses equally to everyone without regard to their merit. Perhaps they'll save a few houses for members of the Politburo or the gymnasts who win olympic medals, but on the whole, they believe — and pass laws that say — no one deserves a better house. I'd say that society wants to distribute houses in a certain way.
Now consider a second society that says the best houses should go to the people who have the most money and the most money should go to the people who deserve it. I'd say that society wants the people with the most money (and therefore the best football players) to have the best houses. If they didn't want that, they could change the laws to implement a different preference.
Hey! Maybe there's even a third option! Some societies want the best houses to go to the people whose parents have the best houses. Again, this society could change that if they wanted to.
If you were to ask the *members* of society what they want, you'd likely get the majority answering that a footballer - even one as good as Messi - doesn't deserve to be nearly as rich as he is.
If you mean to say that the social dynamics in society are such that Messi ends up with the best house - no disagreement there; I even explained how those social dynamics work, roughly.
To say that the result of such social dynamics are the expression of actual desires, however, is wrong on its face. The long-standing social support for wealth redistribution should be proof enough of this.
Indeed. The substitution of "Nazism" for "Satan" in the western ethical cosmos has been another unfortunate development, producing much muddled thinking!
(This development was, of course, not quite as unfortunate as Nazism itself.)
I think this nails it. People don't like the idea because they experience it as a survival threat, even though it isn't one (and is barely even a status threat, since everyone already knows that it's better not to have schizophrenia than to have it...just the word "inferior" itself terrifies people because of its emotional salience).
Surprisingly interesting! (I guess it’s because I’m too used to tricking myself into having a poor opinion of my worth).
To the question "Are people with fibrosis genetically inferior?", one could say something like "when you break your legs, say, that makes you disabled, it makes your life worse, you’d say yes if someone offered you to fix it instantly… but that doesn’t make you less worthy or less respectable than you were before. You’re still as much of a human being as you were before you decided to learn skiing!". For genetic disorders, there’s often no "before", but it’s actually similar, right? And yet, we react to it _completely differently_. Same with people who have friends who are better than them. That is: when I see a forest, I don’t go "okay, that tree’s better than all the others, so let’s just keep that one". I’m not sure how to make sense of that, though. I want to say something about how we feel like we’re in competition with our "friends" all the time, but that sounds really simplistic and kooky when I try to phrase it :-)
* do you think about memetic selection in similar ways as you think about genetic selection? (treating a "carrier" different based on which meme or gene it carries)
For "You are not inferior to anyone" read: "the infantile judgement "You're okay, I'm not okay" is false". The world is still unequal but not as defined by a terrified toddler.
Although the "eugenics bad" argument is effective, I have found calling them (rightfully so) Nazi-esque to be lackluster in reception.
Use sickle cell anemia gene selection due to malaria. Or just use extinct banana variants to show value for genetic diversity being superior to monoculture populations.
> genetic diversity being superior to monoculture populations
I'm sorry, but what does advocating for banana eugenics have to do with the post? If anything, this is the most "Nazi-esque" comment I've read in the responses.
I'm not sure I would say inferior would be the right word choice for what I am saying. Genetic diversity allows for a protective barrier for unforeseen random impetus.
Sickle cell anemia saved lives due to the disease mitigating transmission of malaria in said sub-population.
I'm confused why the superior/inferior dichotomy wouldn't extend to human populations if you're willing to apply it to bananas. And while banana and potato monoculture disasters are strong cases for genetic diversity I don't see how the sickle cell trait is more than just a specific adaptation. From my understanding the reason why it doesn't spread to the entire population in malaria-affected regions is because having two parents with the trait leads to sickle cell anemia.
I kind of hate this. "Haha, you can't trick me" sure feels like putting a semantic stopsign around the concept of superiority/inferiority. It's fine to do it to a journalist because conversing with a journalist is not a matter of epistemics; not so in this case. This kind of thinking may prevent the "inner" journalist from cancelling your soul, but it also allows them to put constraints on your epistemics. This is even worse than what "outer" journalists do, which is merely putting constraints on your _expression_.
Well, I'm sure this isn't anything new to Scott, in fact he wrote about this sort of stuff back in the SSC days.
Bad journalist is a pretty good analogy for the inner critic. This stuff - inequality etc. is especially prone to triggering childish ideas and feelings about who is or isn't okay, thinking under those conditions isn't going to lead to good conclusions.
Humans mostly work in teams - and it's a solid fact that teams with a diverse range of thinking styles make better decisions than culturally uniform teams:
Einstein was intellectually superior to his friends Grossmann and Besso, but the team of three men with complementary thinking styles was much stronger than Einstein working alone:
Call me a collectivist, but I don't really understand the point of judging the intellectual superiority or inferiority of individuals. It seems more meaningful to wonder whether a team that includes a member with schizophrenia risk alleles might perform better than a team of uniform neurotypicals. I have strong intuitions about the answer.
Another basic problem with individual superior/inferior judgements is the possible implication that Grossmann and Besso were obliged to kneel and lick Einstein's boots. In my experience, blithe subordination degrades team performance. The fact that superior Einstein viewed his inferior friends as equals with standing to challenge his ideas is what made their team work. Doing the Church Lady superior dance just gets in the way.
I probably wouldn't eliminate schizophrenia genes, for reasons along those lines (I suspect the marginal gains of having a schizophrenic on your team would be offset by the increased marginal risk of paranoid delusions disrupting morale, but that's not an excuse not to try). But I'm not so sure about cystic fibrosis. And I think the images you have in your mind of what hierarchy looks like (boot licking, the church lady dance) are seriously skewed towards the negative, which we've all experienced, but there is another side. Who enforces workplace equality except a higher authority?
I would eliminate schizophrenia alleles - there's not enough team diversity benefit to outweigh the massive human misery caused by schizophrenia. But that might be a distraction - my point might be better illustrated by the Scott and Lance on a plane scenario. If I add the wrinkle that Scott happens to currently be serving as President of the United States then Scott should definitely get the parachute because his value to team America would far outweigh Lance's intellectual superiority.
I refrain from naming my employer - to emphasize the point that I'm speaking only for myself in this venue - but I internally sounded the warning about literature showing that cloth masks don't work in a building-wide email in the Fall of 2020 (long after proper medical masks and N95s were available on the open market).
Higher authorities anointed to enforce workplace equality sent me a cease-and-desist letter. Last week, one of the authorities did a lame Church Lady superior dance performance in front of Congress. The problem I'm invoking is that when superior individuals start thinking they don't have to listen to critiques coming from their inferiors, team performance is degraded.
Ah sorry to hear that, its no fun. But I can't imagine any real-world equality drive that wouldn't depend on some kind of coercion from a higher authority. Which may be a good reason to resist all equality-drives, but that isn't my position and I'm not sure it's yours, judging by the generally pro-diversity tone of your original post.
We're on the same page. I accept the need for hierarchy in management of large teams. Here, I'll put in a plug for my dad's management system, BOSSA nova https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-LmtcUSN8k . It's hierarchical, but the key feature is that people at the bottom of the organization have a seat at the table in the top circle of management. If my employer used BOSSA nova - or if I were in a union - I wouldn't have been told that inferiors must sit down and shut up because the superior authority must never be challenged.
I worry that thinking about individual superiority in isolation from thinking about the individual's service to a team just promotes the type of individual hubris that gave me the smackdown. It turned out I was right. Lives would have been saved if my inferior ass had been listened to.
And that's not even going into the silly starting assumption that existing systems can do a reasonable job of judging individual merit. Academia has routinely judged minds ranging from Einstein to Kariko as intellectually inferior. And it has judged certain clowns who testified before Congress wearing cloth novelty masks from the local baseball team to be superior. Another reason to be wary of superiority judgements is that we're routinely terrible at it.
Is your dad influenced by the Rule of St Benedict? Apparently there is a rule that the youngest monk should speak first at chapter. But it sounds like your position is something like: genetic engineering is likely to signal boost agreeable traits, because most people don't like conflict or challenge - which means we lose the benefit of disagreeable traits.
Good lord are those Benedictine rules complicated. And I'd call some of them a form of deadly organizational poison. Wiki:
"Chapter 5 prescribes prompt, ungrudging, and absolute obedience to the superior in all things lawful, 'unhesitating obedience' being called the first step (Latin gradus) of humility."
Yeah, um, no thanks!
It's just a guess, but I bet if we engineered all schizophrenia risk alleles out of the population we'd likely take a take a hit on creativity. Agreeability/disagreeability is different - and I note that my reflexive rejection of Chapter 5 is celebrating the fact that I score pretty low on the agreeability axis. I definitely wouldn't want to engineer away disagreeability. Disagreeables can be high-value team members.
Also, I can't resist putting in a plug for another current line of interest. I'm no longer sure genetic engineering is even necessary. I can imagine that there may be epigenetic - or even hidden ordinary genetic - ways to get the job done.
OK, I take it back. The push-back from TGGP below helps me see that we have nowhere near enough understanding of the possible hidden consequences of removing schizophrenia risk alleles. We could theoretically end up in a society with no artists. I'm with you - let's keep the schizophrenia genes, at least for now.
I’ve worked on diverse teams since starting work in a scientific and IT field and someone’s background has no bearing on the science. There isn’t a science view from India that is antagonistic to or can form a synthesis with Mexican science. (Post modernists do see science as just another form of knowledge no different from any folk knowledge, but you wouldn’t probably trust a post modernist to build a bridge).
> The problem with having five old white guys slapping each other on the back while making life-or-death business decisions on the golf course isn’t that they’re old, white, male, and rich
These particular white guys are old, black snappers, male and rich. No doubt, expressed like that we have a problem. If there was some way to go after inherited wealth or privilege, alumni benefits or unearned status then I’d be all in. It used to be called socialism.
But what if the team was not just rich,male and white but just white. A Ukrainian immigrant. An outsourced Albanian engineer. A Scotsman with a heavy accent. A deplorable. These people are, alone, far far different from each other than black, Asian, Indian Americans are from white Americans. Yank diversity isn’t real diversity.
However even if you got these incredibly diverse whites on a team, the diversity wouldn’t change much at all. Maybe localisation into Gaelic would be easier.
I think we're agreeing - the problem with the golf course guys is *not* their race and gender uniformity - the problem is their uniformity of thinking style and their failure to challenge each other's comforting starting assumptions.
Am I inferring correctly that you find Scotland to be comparatively free of the blight of neoracist DEI ideology? Sounds great! That might be where I'll flee if Trump gets re-elected.
My intuition that people with schizophrenia risk alleles might give some types of teams intellectual diversity benefits comes from circumstantial evidence I've seen in the literature - plus direct personal experience teaming up with people who have a family history of schizophrenia. They're remarkably creative individuals, in my experience. Something really could be lost if we were to remove all the schizophrenia risk alleles from the population - particularly if we consider team performance, as opposed to individual performance. I doubt the team performance benefits are big enough to outweigh the staggering amount of misery caused by schizophrenia, but that's beside the point of whether the analogy to cystic fibrosis alleles is appropriate. There is zero benefit arising from cystic fibrosis alleles - whereas there are plausible benefits from schizophrenia alleles.
If you have different intuitions about the hypothesis I'd love to hear what evidence gives you a different view.
I'm not aware of any specific studies involving people with schizophrenia risk alleles - hence I call it "circumstantial" evidence - but we know for sure that people with different thinking styles makes for stronger teams. So to the extent that people at risk of schizophrenia tend to have different thinking styles, they could benefit team performance.
Right - those links are about whether cognitively diverse groups outperform groups where everybody has the same thinking style (answer: conclusive yes). For the question of whether people with schizophrenia risk alleles have distinctive thinking styles that might hypothetically benefit certain types of teams, I turn to Perplexity (results below). Is anybody else out there having as much fun with that thing as I have been? Caveat emptor: it hallucinates sometimes.
Perplexity doesn't provide any evidence supporting my intuition that people with schizophrenia risk alleles tend to be more creative (useful!), but I also note that Perplexity tends to over-emphasize pathology. One time it told me "novelty-seeking" is a psychopathology. Bigotry! But if you take a trust-but-verify approach Perplexity is at least a quick way of pulling together a good list of citations to drill down on.
Perplexity: Based on the search results provided, there is evidence that individuals with a higher polygenic risk score for schizophrenia tend to exhibit differences in certain cognitive abilities and thinking styles compared to those with lower genetic risk, even if they do not develop schizophrenia itself. Here are the key findings:
## Cognitive Abilities
- Higher polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia are associated with lower general cognitive ability (e.g. IQ, processing speed) in the general population [1][2][3][4][5][6][14]. This suggests schizophrenia risk alleles may contribute to cognitive deficits.
- Among individuals with schizophrenia, cognitive performance is correlated with polygenic risk scores for IQ and educational attainment, but not directly with the polygenic risk score for schizophrenia itself [5][11]. This implies cognitive impairment in schizophrenia may be partly mediated by the same genetic factors influencing cognition in the general population.
- The negative association between schizophrenia polygenic risk and cognition appears to emerge after the typical age of psychosis onset, suggesting a neurodevelopmental rather than neurodegenerative effect [3][8].
## Thinking Styles
- If individuals with high schizophrenia polygenic risk do not develop non-affective psychosis, they are more likely to exhibit elevated levels of "magical thinking" (beliefs in telepathy, miracles, etc.) in adulthood, especially in middle age [1]. This may represent a milder form of deviant thinking related to genetic psychosis risk.
- Schizophrenia polygenic risk is associated with poorer spatial visualization skills, suggesting potential differences in visuospatial thinking abilities [6].
In summary, while not directly causing schizophrenia, a higher burden of schizophrenia risk alleles appears to predispose individuals to subtle cognitive deficits and differences in thinking styles, such as magical beliefs and visuospatial difficulties, even in the absence of psychosis [1][3][6][8]. These findings suggest schizophrenia's genetic liability may manifest as neurodevelopmental impairments before illness onset.
Oops. I forgot that Perplexity's most useful outputs often come in the follow-up question rounds.
Perplexity: Based on the provided sources, there is evidence suggesting that individuals with higher polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia tend to exhibit higher levels of creativity compared to the general population. Here are the key findings from the sources:
1. **Genetic Link Between Schizophrenia and Creativity**:
- Several studies have found a significant genetic overlap between schizophrenia and creativity. For instance, polygenic risk scores (PRS) for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have been shown to predict membership in artistic societies or creative professions in both Icelandic and replication cohorts. This indicates that creativity and psychosis share genetic roots [2][4][6][7][8].
2. **Specific Studies and Findings**:
- A study published in *Nature Neuroscience* found that genetic risk scores for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were significantly higher in individuals defined as creative (e.g., members of national artistic societies) compared to the general population. The scores were approximately halfway between the general population and those with the disorders themselves, suggesting a direct influence of genetic factors on creativity [4].
- Another study conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) and found a positive genetic overlap between creativity and schizophrenia. This study used PRS analyses and confirmed that higher creativity was partially explained by common genetic variations that also contribute to psychiatric disorders [3][5].
3. **Mechanisms and Implications**:
- The shared genetic basis between creativity and psychiatric disorders may involve overlapping cognitive processes and brain functional connectivity. For example, altered brain connectivity, which is involved in creativity, has also been found in schizophrenia and depression [3].
- The findings suggest that creative individuals may have a genetic predisposition towards thinking differently, which, when combined with other biological or environmental factors, could lead to mental illness [4].
In summary, the evidence supports the notion that people with higher polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia tend to be more creative than the general population. This relationship is likely due to shared genetic factors that influence both creativity and susceptibility to psychiatric disorders [2][3][4][6][7][8].
> (as the old saying goes, everyone has someone who’s better than them and someone who’s worse than them, with two exceptions. And any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.)
Well, that's only true if you force everyone into a complete order.
Scott and 'Lance' are actually exceptions, for most pairs of people, it's not clear who would be 'better'.
I disagree. For most pairs of people, we can absolutely decide who is better and the cases where we can't are the exceptions. I think triaging for ventilators on the COVID ward made this clear.
Triage isn't about your quality as a person, it's about your likelihood of survival with or without treatment, and if we're really desperate then it's about how many QALYs you have left. Triage very explicitly ignores questions like how smart you are and what you do for a living.
Basically, yes, it's easy to compare people on some axes, like height or weight or for triage. But it's much rarer to have pairs like 'Lance' and Scott where Lance is better on almost all axes, instead of the more usual: better on some and worse on others, and perhaps better on some reasonable weighted averages.
I’ll agree that there is no abstract sense in which someone is better in all situations. But there certainly are situations where someone is better in **this situation**. Even if **this situation** is “contributes to society”.
> I’ll agree that there is no abstract sense in which someone is better in all situations.
Oh, I think we might disagree there. I think there are some pairs of people where one is 'better' than the other in that sense. I just thing those pairs are rare.
That is an assumption of its own (one I agree with, mind you), but triage during COVID did (or at least it was suggest that they should) take positions on other, highly-politically-charged questions: vaccination status, race, occupation, etc.
This seems more a post about language and social etiquette than anything else. If you accept some people have better genes than others (in the sense of more conducive to health, intelligence or whatever other qualities we think are good), then yes some people are genetically better or worse than others. We don't say this directly because it's at best rude, and at worst an indication of taboo politics. But we're talking about different things that language is doing here.
the text of this article could be replaced with a yes_chad.jpg.
Scott, you're a transhumanist. Remember what that means? "We want to live forever in perfect health and absolute morphological freedom, optimally also in total post-scarcity." And because we're not evil, append "for, at the absolute least, every human".
(inb4 "define 'human'": one, for the hypothetical anyone asking that question, "everybody who doesn't put up that gotcha", two, s0ph1a's Lower Bound is "one dyson swarm made of computronium instantiating its own version of paradise, to every living thing".)
hell, i have a whole section of my tumblr about this. under the tags "glorious transhuman future" and "bioconservative cishumanism is a self-solving problem".
actually here's my position pasted directly from there:
this is not a problem that can't be solved by the method of “open free genehacking clinics on every street corner” where “free” means “it costs zero” and “anyone can enter there and ask for a genetic mod that their geneline will carry henceforth, selected on a catalog of every trait we know how to mod or do iterated embryo selection for”
inb4 “but not everybody would want to use them and then the people who haven’t been genehacked will be unfairly disadvantaged”: oh, so you want Fairness? ok, then sterilize everyone so that nobody will make kids without having thought at least once in their life about making kids or had an opportunity to choose which traits their kids will have
inb4 “but then it will become necessary to have certain genehacks to access certain things” yeah so? right now it is necessary to have certain partially-genetically-determined capabilities to do things, too; at least this scheme permits choosing
inb4 “but then there won’t be disabled people anymore”: Deaf people often want their kids to be Deaf. aspie people often want their kids to be aspie. there are even people who want kids with Down’s, and when i say EVERY TRAIT we know how to mod, I MEAN IT
inb4 “making fertility opt-in would enrage the trads who want people who fuck to be punished with kids they don’t want”: that is a feature, not a bug
inb4 “introducing a trivial inconvenience to fertility would prevent so much births that there wouldn’t be enough people to support the olds”: i’m counting on there being enough people who’d choose to mod for additional intelligence that they’d make fully automated luxury gay space communism happen
"inb4 “making fertility opt-in would enrage the trads who want people who fuck to be punished with kids they don’t want”: that is a feature, not a bug"
I would not choose to live in your future, which pleases both of us: you, because you won't be disturbed by having to share the world with a 'trad' and me because I won't have to live beside someone who uses "inb4".
EDIT: More broadly, it seems a very deterministic world, not really one of liberty and be what you will.
“anyone can enter there and ask for a genetic mod that their geneline will carry henceforth, selected on a catalog of every trait we know how to mod or do iterated embryo selection for”
So, suppose Me In That World makes the decision that I want all my descendants to be, ugh, despicable basket of deplorables "trads" and I fix my germline so that the traits I consider desirable are carried forward. Well, maybe my grandkids decide they hate their lives and want to change it all, so they go and mod their germlines. Curses, foiled again!
Or am I? At the very least, I've determined that two generations will hold the values I consider desirable. Even if the grandkids want to break the chain for their children, they themselves can't change what happened to them. And maybe I can make it so that the mods stick; so that the mindset of the descendants will be such they will never dream of rebelling against what I chose for them, in perpetuity, fixed in the germline.
At least by the messy conventional way, there is always the chance of change, of a new roll of the dice throwing up unexpected results. I don't know Sophia's family background, but what if four generations back the great-grandparents had a chance to set the traits they deemed desirable in their descendants? Would they have selected "I want a good, obedient girl who will grow up to be a wife and mother, go to church, and live a respectable, conventional life"? Those were the kind of traits deemed desirable back then.
We're choosing based on what we want, not on what our descendants may want or need, and forgetting that children have minds and wills and desires of their own.
> I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”?
The mental model of lance that you created in the reader has lance insisting that you take the parachute because Lance is just that kind of guy that will sacrifice his life to save a stranger. 😆
No, he'd give up the parachute because that's the right thing to do, but he wouldn't be at risk from not having one. He has no way to sacrifice his life for someone else.
I think the answer is to say that you have "equal value as human beings" in an important non-spooky way, even though, in forced choice dilemmas where a judge should save you or Lance, they should save Lance.
In such dilemmas, they should save Lance for instrumental reasons, even though you both have equal value as human beings. It's not because he deserves better treatment than Scott. Both of you individually deserve to be saved (as captured by your equal moral value as humans). But better consequences will result from saving the smarter, funnier etc. person (all things which are only contingently instrumentally valuable).
* Better and worse should always refer to a specific activity. Taller, for example, is a physical quality but not an inherently better or worse one;
* Smarter is a grab bag that encompasses almost too much to be helpful. We can sit and endlessly decompose it until it basically disappears. And yet upon returning to the real world, no one really doubts it that someone people are just plain smarter than others;
* Few doubt the existence of better and worse in any number of areas. And that implies a possibility of quantification. And that often leads to results that feel disappointing in practice. But often far from totally useless;
* These arguments generally lead to scenarios positing a sort of God’s Eye view, and wondering what that would mean. If you could truly measure the absolute worth of two people, and you found yourself in a situation where you were forced to choose who would live… You can avoid playing the game and appear obtuse. But being too eager to play often makes people uncomfortable as it appears that you are trying to prepare the ground for something terrible;
* People that I’d refer to as ‘messaging elites’ shut down conversation. But give parents the ability to design their babies and you’d learn what people really think;
* Designer babies could drive to extinction any of the various groups that claim to be ‘born this way’.
This analysis should be more explicitly stated as being a *utilitarian* analysis. In those terms it's very clear: people can be inferior to others in terms of the practical consequences of their lives on the world, it can be right to take this into account in moral decisions, but we should avoid being entirely truthful (or at least clear) about this because of the consequences of such truth on society.
Other moral theories will yield different analyses.
Perhaps another angle to approach this from is the reverse. Not to ask if you would like to be cured from something, but to ask, "if you don't have it, would you like to get it?"
"You don't have alzheimer's. Here is a medication that will give you alzheimer's. Would you like to take it?"
"You don't have cystic fibrosis. Would you like some medication that gives you cystic fibrosis?"
I'm pretty confident that anyone will answer, "no" to these.
"You have an IQ of 100. Here is a medication that will give you +20 IQ points. Would you like to have it?"
"You have a BMI of 35. Would you like some medication that will take your BMI into a normal range, without any change to diet or exercise?"
I'm also pretty sure a lot of people will say "yes" to these.
The argument is of course that if you are given an ability to add something, then to some additions people will say yes and to some others people say no. This by itself can be used to determine what should be considered "good" and what is "bad".
Something like this is correct, the snag is we all develop a picture of Who We Are, and big life changes that challenge this picture are stressful, including positive changes. So whereas I wouldn't choose cystic fibrosis, I may refuse an uptick in IQ. It would totally alter the balance of power in my personal relationships. Of course it's different choosing characteristics for the next generation who have no mental picture of themselves yet.
"You have a BMI of 35. Would you like some medication that will take your BMI into a normal range, without any change to diet or exercise?"
Given the popularity of Ozempic/Wegovy, I think that one has already been answered. We'd all like a magic pill to make us smarter, thinner and more attractive without putting in any effort.
In the spirit of your "giving up 70% of the way through the hyperstitious slur cascade" post, it seems pragmatic to just treat "genetically inferior/superior" as minor but old and well-established slurs, and avoid them in favor of more or less synonymous words like "genetically advantaged/disadvantaged" or something. I think those seem a little less ripe for misunderstanding, and much less ripe for bad actors seeking controversy.
In a calm conversation, I expect most people would agree that many genetic conditions reduce quality of life, and that it would be preferable not to have those conditions if they were able to choose without any risk or side effects.
Put it this way: I believe it's illegal in the UK for IVF couples to select embryos with a genetic abnormality if embryos without it are available. And this was the same government that introduced the Equality Act and so on. Also the UK courts ruled against some people with Down's Syndrome who were challenging the right to abort children with Down's. So apparently there is some space for messiness here.
I think a lot of the weirdness around this subject comes around to the question of identity, and whether our genes are a thing we *have* or a thing we *are*. "Lance *has* better genes than Scott" doesn't sound too offensive, "Lance *is* genetically superior to Scott" sounds horrible. You could even go for "Lance has more genetic privilege than Scott".
Are your genes a thing you have or a thing you are? If you had better genes, would you still be you? It's not a question with a sensible answer.
Do I wish I had better genes? Sure. Do I wish that I'd never been born and a sibling with slightly better genes (a different egg-sperm combo) had been born in my place? Hell no. Are these questions actually different?
Agreed. And there is vastly more information in the details of our central nervous systems than there was and is in our genes. Not precisely equivalent to "in our memories", but close...
My recollection of the theory around cystic fibrosis was one copy of the gene (not enough to give you cystic fibrosis, it's recessive) gave you thicker mucus and protected against bacterial diarrhea, which used to be a much bigger killer than it is now. Kind of like sickle cell and malaria.
I think the current theory is tuberculosis resistance likely via some crazy bankshot biochemistry involving lower levels of arylsulfatase B. TB resistance matches the epidemiology of CFTR mutations better than cholera and the less CFTR --> less cAMP-induced chloride secretion --> less diarrhea theory, while superficially compelling, doesn't really bear out in studies
TB resistance not particularly helpful if you have full-on CF, in fact in CF there's a pretty high frequency of non-tuberculosis mycobacterial infections that are really really really bad, so this doesn't relate to the post at all, but it's interesting!
The thing is, human politics doesn't really do the sane version of this "inequality".
The sane (idealized utilitarian) version looks like "people in group A are on average 5% more morally valuable than people in group B, so we should include that term when deciding how to solve trolley problems. Of course, clear trolley problems are rare in real life. So this doesn't matter much"
When people are arguing that group A are more valuable than group B, usually it's Nazi thinking. "group B are evil scum, kill them all".
So "treat all humans as if they were equal" is ethics advice that will protect against some of the worst humans have done to each other across history. And in return, will get you slightly wrong answers in a few situations where the numbers are close anyway.
It's not advice a superintelligence would use. But given the crudeness and biases of human thought, it is a good heuristic at our level.
When it comes to discussions of genetic screens driving embryo selection, which is the majority of the eugenics-adjacent conversation here, the relevant question is surely "if my parents had a choice between having me or Lance, would/should they have picked Lance?" You cover a number of things "inferior" could mean, but not this one.
It's (usually) not harmful acknowledging others are superior. As soon as you start thinking of people as inferior, and start to draw conclusions from this, it gets nasty. You acknowledging Lance is better in every possible way and should get the parachute is fine. *Him* deciding that he is better in every possible way and making that decision (and maybe using force to implement his decision) is not fine. He could, for example, be a brute, physically stronger than you, but not smarter - and you'd still end up dead, and he'd end up alive.
Thinking of groups of people as inferior is genuinely *bad*. It's not about journalists tricking you, it's about preventing something harmful to society. The large majority of us are *not* high decouplers. Once we start thinking of some group of people (to keep with your example, sufferers from Cystic Fibrosis) as inferior, that will have consequences on how we treat them.
>He could, for example, be a brute, physically stronger than you, but not smarter - and you'd still end up dead, and he'd end up alive.
>Thinking of groups of people as inferior is genuinely *bad*. It's not about journalists tricking you, it's about preventing something harmful to society.
I absolutely agree that thinking of people as inferior is genuinely bad. But Lance using strength to determine worth is no less problematic than Scott using “smarts” to determine worth. Strong people are no less entitled to a strength-based society in which they could thrive than smart people are to a smarts-based one. Currently, we have a smarts-based one and that is causing enormous problems for the majority of people in the world who are not particularly smart.
I think the opposite fear is overcompensation of the fear of dehumanization, which is also fair.
We should seek to produce more parachutes, and if that means accepting some groups are more instrumental to that goal than others, then we should recognize this reality without fear of dehumanizing anyone.
While I was generally nodding along to the parachute observation and would give the last parachute to someone more competent than me at a wide variety of topics (I would say "gladly", but I'm pretty sure I'd be terrified out of my mind; still there is something that the word "gladly" captures that feels true), I would feel really bad really fast if someone else made the parachute decision and gave it to *me*. Basically the equivalent of a mental blue screen of death, yet if I'm on the plane with one of my friends, actually remarkably likely?! Ugh. I suspect we'd both crash while arguing about who gets the parachute (or get close to it, anyway; at some point some kind of instinct would take over and I don't know what that would do).
I would say that you and Lance have equal moral worth in the abstract. That is, excepting if it messes with Lance's charity work or something, it's equally bad for you or Lance to suffer.
Thanks for documenting another way in which malicious people take an innocuous idea and twist it around into an excuse to make you look like a bad person. The more people are aware of these dirty tricks, the less hold they'll have on our society.
I mean, speaking as someone who is an amputee due to a birth defect, I'm fine with saying my genetics could be better, and would be fine applying this same thinking process to others. This seems objectively true.
What doesn't seem true, but is implied/suggested by the discussion in the post, is that "genetically inferior == inferior". Surely what someone does with the (genetic and other) endowments they've been given at birth, matters for how we should judge their worth as a person?
If so, in the same way, it's possible to be scornful of a rich person who wastes it all, and praise someone who uses every one of the few dollars at their disposal in a good way, even though objectively that doesn't achieve much, and kinda be lukewarm about the rare person who starts off a billionaire and gives a few hundred million over their lifetime to charities that save thousands of lives, because yes that's good but they didn't have to put in much effort to accomplish it, did they?
Back to genetics: it's not just your endowment in the genetic lottery that ought to matter in how you think of yourself and how others think of you. what you do with it matters, and the judgement should be linked to how well you did given the hand you were dealt. This is not incompatible with wanting everyone to be dealt better hands in future, so that doing absolutely great things is easier for future people.
"Another possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying? It’s a claim about the US legal system. “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases.” Why am I supposed to feel cosmically reassured by this decision?"
That's all that was ever claimed for the proposition "all men are equal".
It is a vast advance over the norm in human history that some have more rights than others. It is unsatisfying because it's been true for long enough that you think "Is that all there is?"
But it is becoming less true, as privilege worms its way back into the law.
<i>That's all that was ever claimed for the proposition "all men are equal".</i>
Erm, no? The traditional liberal claim is indeed that all men are inherently equal, that equality under the law is a recognition of this fact, and that legal privilege is bad because it contradicts mankind's basic equality.
And that claim was rooted in Christian ideas of humans having equal dignity (because all humans are made in the image of God) and equal moral value (because God loves all humans).
We are all genetically inferior to healthy humans as defined by the World Health Organization - and to our transhuman and posthuman descendants. Today, rare cases of so-called “elective disability” do exist: deaf parents who want deaf children. But no depressive prospective parent wants depressive children; and no-one with a chronic pain disorder wants pain-ridden kids.
In my view, genome reform is vital for a civilized biosphere. And I think it’s easier to “sell” genome reform in the language of remediation rather than enhancement. For sure, the language of remediation risks making some people feel genetically inferior. But talk of enhancement risks triggering the “e” word - which soon shuts down intelligent debate.
[Another thorny issue is intelligence - as currently defined. Genetically ratcheting up “IQ” will almost certainly ratchet up “AQ” too. Prospective parents seeking high-IQ kids probably aren't considering where they want their future offspring to fall on the Spectrum. But what AQ is optimal for the individual and society as a whole?]
*cocks a sceptical eyebrow* If some hypothetical putative future Talkie Toaster thinks I'm its great-to-the-nth grandma, I don't want to be the forebear of anything that stupid and I don't accept it as my grandkid.
I confess I had in mind super-sentient full-spectrum superintelligences rather than a Talkie Toaster. But as long as the entity in question can't suffer, I'm fairly relaxed about the details.
My position on this is crass, crude, bigoted, and fixed around the time of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, where online discussion was hyperventilating about the treatment of the Cylons.
My position was, and remains, "You are a Talkie Toaster. I don't consider you a person, no matter how sophisticated the machinery, and have no ethical, moral or legal qualms about 'you tell me the info I need or I pull the plug on you', so decide which you want" 😁
Funnily enough, for the *original* Cylons I had more nuance on "are they indeed independent sentient entities?" but since the new version appeared to be there just as "hot chicks to be fantasy material for the fanboys" (at least the little I saw of the reboot before I ditched it), nah - Talkie Toasters!
Superiority-as-such can feel like something we definitely have because of the salience of status hierarchies, but it only has narrow context validity (superiority at something, for something).
Behold! The only people who are genetically and/or humanistically inferior are those who spend their time and energy deliberately trying to push other people down the status hierarchy
Behold! I did not deliberately push anyone down the status hierarchy. If you decide that this comment applies to you, that is between you and your conscience.
I'm surprised you think it's pretty much everyone. I suppose I'm grateful I've found circles of friends who lift each other up all the time to the point where I almost took it for granted.
Scott's doing the same thing with his disdain of journalists and the left in general, and as someone else pointed out, the original comment is doing it as well. Not that I think less of them for it, mind you. Status heirarchies will exist no matter how much you try to ignore them. It's generally preferable to be near the top.
It seems to be that this is about identity, in the sense of "If X was different, would you be the same person?" If you have cystic fibrosis you can probably imagine what it's like without it - like a particularly good day, but better - and wouldn't say it's part of your identity. Whereas there are many deaf people who regard deafness as part of their identity because if they hadn't been deaf, they would not have been part of the deaf culture which is part of their identity (apologies if I'm not expressing that correctly - I'm not deaf). A particularly interesting case is trans, where I imagine a trans person might answer the following questions differently: "would you prefer to have been born with a body matching your brain" and "would you prefer to have been born with a brain matching your body" - because in the latter case they might think of this being a different person, whereas in the former case they might not.
I get the sense that society is still exploring the ethics of how much parents should influence their children's identity and indeed how much society should be able to influence the identity of its members. Because, while currently it is in vogue to believe that identity is yours to choose alone, this only works if you are in fact quite restrictive in what you consider part of your identity. Identity shares a lot with reputation, in that things that many people consider part of their identity (how attractive or pretty or they are, for example) are actually in the eye of the beholder.
Most people at some in their lives go through a grieving process when something that they consider part of their identity is no longer true (eg, that they are young).
On another note, while I get the aspirational sense of the title, objectively it is false - particularly if you are a child. We are social animals and I think it's a rare individual who can completely ignore the sense of status that is signalled by the people around them, especially if it's a signal from the majority. Even if they can do so on an intellectual level. Rather like "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt". People need some outside support to be able to disregard negative signals completely. Not everyone has this.
>It seems to be that this is about identity, in the sense of "If X was different, would you be the same person?" If you have cystic fibrosis you can probably imagine what it's like without it - like a particularly good day, but better - and wouldn't say it's part of your identity.
Agreed, but there are additional Xs that are non-genetic with similar effects:
"If one had majored in X2 rather than in X1, would one be the same person?"
"If one's first job had been job2 rather than job1, would one be the same person?"
I will add that inferiority and superiority about capacities is different from what normally is meant in human societies. Depending on society, inferior people have worse politics (America), worse bloodline (India / Wizarding World), worse chance at salvation (JWs, Nation of Islam), lower dignity (Nazism / Ebenezer Scrooge /antebellum Southern culture and after). The inferiority has little to nothing to do with individual capacities and entitles others to treat them unkindly. Don't be an asshole (to others or your own soul) is an important category that people have to be reminded of shockingly often.
Isn’t “you aren’t worse than anyone” a pure value claim? How can a value claim be wrong? If it’s the case that we are always computing our position in a status hierarchy, isn’t “you aren’t worse than anyone” simply a value claim “you aren’t low status”?
You seem to be making the mistake of trying to interpret a value claim on a factual basis. The woke canceler types clearly don’t accept Hume’s fork as real and an important (valuable?) precept for rational thought.
I don’t see how a person can reason about their values and work out contradictions between them unless they have some framework by which values are real. In the absence of an explicit framework for thinking, why would you get anything other than emotionally loaded contradictions?
This strikes at the heart of the Enlightenment notion of equality. Equality isn't a physical claim, but a metaphysical one. We are not equal in height, weight, or ability, but we were born equal in dignity and in moral worth. The notion of equality at birth, just like Hammurabi's notion that slaves are worth a fraction of freemen and "intermediate persons" are worth something in between, has no basis in physical reality--but it's created a far more just, peaceful, stable, and prosperous world than the various doctrines of inequality ever have.
Reminiscent of the professors mocking undergraduate students because a majority of them think they're above average... drivers, say; thing is, the students are right and the professors are dumb, it's an ill-formed question.
Mary has a map of the city in her head. Paul has never gotten a ticket. John can beat the Google Maps time estimate every time. Jacqueline is faultlessly polite at merges... They are all correct: they are above average at the metrics which matter to them. Since the professor didn't specify metrics, to argue that they are mistaken you first have to establish that the professor... polite word... erred.
Interesting post, but I think casting the second question as a trap runs some fairly obvious risks. Namely, if you are actually sliding down the road to being a Nazi, we'll, you're never going to confront it.
No one can make you feel inferior, but you can surely as fuck make yourself feel superior and label everyone else as inferior in your head.
There are good reasons not to have a society with definite genetic ranking.
There would be all sorts of efforts and cheating to game the standards.
What's worse, there would be constant resource-sucking fighting over who's entitled to what.
While a lot of societies have fights over status, at least some of it is about groups rather than individuals, which permits a little work to get done.
I think 'inferior' necessarily implies a comparison. But if I am enjoying life I don't see how I can compare myself to Lance on that metric. Lance doesn't enjoy being me more than I do! So on the important question of the parachute and the plane I am making a grab for it. I am the best at enjoying my own life! Sorry Lance but glad you are so great you let me have the parachute.
I feel like you’re ignoring the fact that inferior means subordinate. Saying you’re not inferior, also means you’re not a 2nd class citizen, it means that no other is your master without your consent, it means you aren’t inherently low-status & have class mobility. Not being inferior is the foundation of your freedom & democracy.
Saying you are genetically inferior is different than saying you are genetically worse off because inferior is a word tangled with power dynamics & worse off isn’t.
I think you're downplaying the importance of equal before the law. Historically, this was obviously abnormal, with many societies having explicit classes of people who received vastly different treatment from their respective legal systems. Everything from different rules about who can do what, limitations on who you can marry or what jobs you can do, different levels of punishment for the same crimes, no prosecution for favored people/groups, and literal slavery for disfavored groups.
To me, it's one of the biggest and most important aspects of Western society - equality before the law. This is not something we should take for granted or downplay.
It's also, to me, one of the biggest aspects of saying that someone isn't inferior to someone else.
Sure, we might say that Lance should get the parachute (or organ transplant, or whatever) if we were forced to pick, but notably Lance could not force that decision. Someone else could get it, if they wanted. If someone else also wants it, we go through the legal system and Lance doesn't get priority just because he's smarter or richer or whatever.
> Historically, this was obviously abnormal, with many societies having explicit classes of people who received vastly different treatment from their respective legal systems.
Yes and no. I thought of the inequities we have in current society, and agree that they exist and can be problematic. Lots of low level "I can afford a decent attorney" even without the true effects of being rich and powerful enough to distort who even gets prosecuted in the first place.
But, compared to historic situations, it's not even close. Kings used to be able to rape and murder in public with zero consequences. So could their friends, powerful merchants, clergy, whoever had enough power. And there were rarely if ever checks and balances that would value the non-powerful or give them a reasonable avenue to appeal. They could try to find someone powerful to take up their cause, but nothing required the powerful to even pretend to listen, let alone make any changes.
> Kings used to be able to rape and murder in public with zero consequences. So could their friends, powerful merchants, clergy, whoever had enough power.
This is a pretty shocking misunderstanding of the past. It's a caricature that exists solely for the purpose of congratulating yourself on being better than a culture you clearly aren't familiar with. Good work!
You really don't think 𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 had cause to be concerned over their public image?
This is going to depend a lot on specifics, but do you deny that a non-trivial number of kings were able to do that with impunity? Clearly not every king could, and sometimes they would overstep and get assassinated or made to capitulate and sign away their power.
Did Genghis Khan have the power I describe? Attila the Hun? Nero? Pope John XII?
It's hard to argue that [at least some] historic kings acted above the law. It's also hard to argue that what happens currently is systematically and substantially less than used to happen in the past - at pretty much every pre-modern country and time. The few exceptions seem to prove the rule, if any truly exist.
Genghis Khan didn't even have the power to disown his wife's bastard, something that would have been automatic for pretty much any king with much less power than he had.
Kings are free to have some people killed. They are sharply circumscribed in how they use that power. Everything a king ever does has consequences for the king. No one has ever had the power you describe.
> Clearly not every king could, and sometimes they would overstep and get assassinated or made to capitulate and sign away their power.
This is just a statement that kings did not possess the power you describe. Everything they do increases or detracts from their legitimacy, and if it drops too low, they get deposed. That a particular king navigated this balance without being deposed doesn't mean he wasn't constrained by it.
One thing we can tell with certainty from the historical record is that popular legitimacy was one of the foremost concerns of 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 king, no matter the time, no matter the place.
The modern position of the Chinese Communist Party is that the imperial system was bad because the emperor's power was unconstrained. I have a friend who has repeated that slogan to me several times.
I asked her once about an imperial decree that I'd heard of, issued by the Empress Cixi and banning the elite practice of foot binding. She reported back that Cixi really had issued that decree, but there was no effect. When I asked how this was compatible with the idea that the emperor's power was unconstrained, she said "you don't understand. Nobody would have followed that order."
I personally don't have much trouble simply answering "yes" to "am I inferior to Lance?"; I don't put very much stake in my ability to roll a 1 on the first throw of an 8-billion-sided die.
But of course "Lance" isn't real, he's an extremely contrived rhetorical device. I personally have never met anyone who's even comparable, let alone clearly superior to me in anything but a niche of a niche of my life. It's one thing to get depressed over something that is actually real, but you'll seriously trouble yourself if you let yourself get depressed over things that are merely conceivable!
I don't understand how people benefit from reading a statement to the universal "you." The writer isn't talking to *YOU,* the individual. They don't know *YOU.* It's not for *YOU.*
It's for everyone, which means it's for no one. Certainly not for *YOU.*
Jason Paragin's argument that "you probably suck and you'll have to accept that and something about it if you want to stop sucking" is both accurate *and*, in my opinion, infinitely more useful than broadly assuring everyone-and-no-one-in-particular of their own worthiness:
Oh, huh, I tried reading that back in those days, but never got into it. I didn't realize it was the same guy, or I might have pushed longer. Maybe I should try it again.
Fiction very much depends on independent taste. John Dies at the End is amongst the funniest books I've ever read (if not THE funniest; I'm struggling to think of a funnier one) *and* it's amongst the most existentially thought-provoking / disturbing.
If you're not into its particular brand of humor, it's not going to work.
There is a process of determining whether genes are beneficial or not. It is called natural selection. The only objective measure of the value of a gene is the degree to which it makes it more likely that the other genes in the genome will survive and be passed on. Genes that are "bad" get weeded out over the long term, no matter how admirable the carriers may appear to be in many ways. If a gene is not successful in propagating itself it is a "bad" gene.
Saying that an entire genome is superior or inferior to any other is to imply that all genomes - and therefore people - can be ranked in a hierarchy, with the person with the best genome at the top and the person with the worst at number 8,103,247,006.. This is ridiculous, even in theory. At this point we usually can't even reliably determine the relative fitness value of individual genes, much less an entire genome. It may be that in the future a gene that we consider bad - say it shortens life - will turn out to confer immunity against a plague that wipes out the rest of humanity. Surely that would mean carriers of that gene were genetically "superior," right? Yet it would be kind of stupid to say that, wouldn't it?
It seems there is confusion between the concepts of genetic inferiority and moral worth. I'd say possessing homozygous cystic fibrosis genes is genetic inferiority, and I shall prove it thus: if it is not inferior you will not mind if I conduct some gene therapy on you and give you cystic fibrosis. Is that the case, or would you run a mile from me? Hold still now, you told me it isn't "inferior"!
So:
Yes, cystic fibrosis is a bad thing to have.
Yes, it makes you genetically inferior in the sense it is undesirable.
And the question you missed out:
No, it does not make you morally inferior, ie worth less as a person.
I'm seeing the same confusion in matters of equity of outcome. Individuals are different, with differing abilities along various axes. There is no reason in the world to expect equal outcomes for all, but we always lived with that by agreeing that all are equal in moral worth, that all lives are equally valuable. By what simplistic calculus do we now ignore that and declare that human differences are intolerable?
I think to give a better answer to the (innter) journalist one would first have to define the concept of inferiority more clearly. It seems to me that on the one hand there is an instrumental meaning of the word. The average human is for example a worse tool for hammering a nail than ... well ... a hammer.
But the sense of inferiority the journalist is appealing to in their question about one (human) being being inferior to another is about a categorical ordering among (human) beings. I think one quite defensible answer is to reply "no" since such an ordering simply does not exist (or, if you are Strawsonian about predicates assigned to non-existing entities, you may answer that the question is non-sensical).
Am I, e.g., categorically superior to a wolf? Is the wolf categorically superior to Pluto? Surely, it is not sufficient to point to all the ways I am instrumentally superior to the wolf or in which Pluto is instrumentally superior to me. For here we get into the paradoxes of social choice theory. Each ordering over an instrumental dimension can be thought of as a voter in trying to choose one categorical superiority ordering. According to Arrow's theorem, then there is no choice function that is Pareto-efficient and satisfies the non-dictatorship and independence of irrelevant alternatives criteria. I think it is fair to stop at this point and simply deny that a satisfactory categorical inferiority/superiority ranking of beings can be had.
If one however wants to grant the existence of such a ranking, it appears most sensible to me to give up non-dictatorship. However, one should then make a principled choice which kind of instrumental utility should determine the categorical ranking. I think any such choice is absurd.
For example, maybe you think a being's moral value should determine their place in the superiority ranking? Then under something like utilitarianism the degree of a being's capacity to cause the experience of positive or negative qualia should determine where they are in the ranking. Now, assuming that this can in principle be quantified and is knowable (a big assumption!), would you really go to an oil rig and tell it "You are infinitely inferior to me, you pile of scrap"? This seems to go completely against how we use the word "inferior". So moral value does not give rise to an ordering of categorical inferiority.
Now pick any other trait. Clearly examining that trait does not suffice to decide whether Scott or Lance should get the parachute in the example. Whether Scott or Lance should get the parachute is not determined by one of them being inferior to the other categorically, but by their moral value.
And I think there is just no big puzzle there. If Lance is a toddler, many people might intuitively want to save the child even though Scott is instrumentally superior to Lance in almost all dimensions. Is Scott therefore categorically inferior to Lance or vice-versa? If Lance is a nuclear warhead that will explode on the plane's impact and kill a million people, is parachuting it to safety an admission that somehow Scott is inferior to a nuclear warhead? If Lance has cystic fibrosis than perhaps Scott ought to get the parachute - again, this has nothing to do with Lance being categorically inferior to Scott. All of these are just normal moral dilemmata. A total inferiority ordering over beings would neither be sufficient nor necessary to resolve them.
TL;DR: One should distinguish instrumental and categorical inferiority, Arrow's impossibility theorem prevents a good definition of categorical inferiority grounded in instrumental inferiority, picking moral inferiority as dictatorship rule to determine categorical inferiority leads to absurd results, moral inferiority as one type of instrumental inferiority determines how moral dilemmata ought to be solved, a categorical inferiority ranking adds nothing to this. Hence one should just rely "no/the question is non-sensical to the (inner) journalist.
There's a passage in Leviticus 21 that describes physical requirements for a priest making offerings to God. They can't be blind, lame, mutilated, hunch-backed, a dwarf, have rashes, etc. It doesn't call out cystic fibrosis, but it's safe to assume that would be disqualifying.
Some Christians wrestle with that passage because it implies that God considers certain people to be inferior, which goes against the idea of an inclusive and compassionate God in the New Testament. It's especially jarring to our modern sensibilities where we use euphemisms like "differently-abled" to characterize qualities that most would consider inferior.
I think a more satisfying explanation (from a Christian perspective) is that if we're to be resurrected some day with a new body, we can be sure that our new body won't be blind or lame or have CF, because God recognizes that those qualities are inferior.
Maybe in Christian heaven you and Lance would be equally attractive? Or at the very least both hunch-back free.
I wouldn't say *exception* , since he wasn't king at the time, and never became king, and died shortly afterward.
But being a relative of the next(?) king, it caused a lot of bad blood that IMHO was only resolved when William the Conqueror (some sort of cousin to the strikee) defeated Harold Godwinson (son of the striker, Godwin). So...
Many Thanks! I wasn't thinking specifically of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Aetheling (Is that who you mean?), but just of the general idea that, given this test, it was possible to make a king not throne-worthy (and therefore less powerful) by blinding rather than killing him - hence a general exception to the general advice about striking at kings.
the issue with "inferior" and "superior" when discussing genetics is we often use those terms in establishing a hierarchy of obedience or submission or value, but that's not what we mean with cystic fibrosis
A lieutenant is superior to a private who is inferior. A father is superior to the daughter. The pastor is superior to the congregant. The therapist is superior to the patient, which is why if a sexual relationship starts, the therapist has abused their superior position as an authority/expert in the persons psychological life.
there is a whole religion with a confessional document that spells out the sins of superiors and inferiors in social relationships (the Presbyterian church) based on their understanding of the fifth commandment. But nobody in that church would ever apply it to cystic fibrosis (though the southern presbyterians before the civil war, sadly, tried to apply it to so-called superior and inferior races.
We evolved in a context in which cystic fibrosis very much changes one's place in all useful hierarchies. Modern notions of superior/inferior are often attempts to hide the evolved hierarchies.
I think the name for the quality this essay points out is "incoherence". If you say a thing one way, it's obvious; if you say it another way, it's a terrible crime. This is like trying to talk about square circles. How many sides do they have? Scott is chafing at having to live under an incoherent ethical system.
My diagnosis is that this incoherence comes from a fundamental paradox in the system's implicit assumptions. The conflicting assumptions are: "It makes sense to consider ethical matters from an objective standpoint" and "People aren't eternal beings". If you drill down far enough into what objectivity means and what it entails for ethical considerations, you see it's a standpoint that's only possible eternally -- that is, from outside time, to a viewer who is personally unaffected by the contingencies of history. This is the role you're pretending to take on when you compare Scott and Lance. But if Scott and Lance aren't themselves eternal beings, then their lives and fates are rendered irrelevant by the historical contingencies that, definitionally, don't affect the objective viewer. They don't have any existence outside of irrelevant historical contingencies.
I'm saying Judeo-Christian ethics without God is a square circle. You can enforce belief in square circles all you want, and everybody can go around telling each other they believe in square circles, but it's going to get awkward when someone like Scott starts asking questions about how many sides they have. That's the incoherence. Judeo-Christian ethics makes it seem bad to treat people differently just because of what genes they were born with (which makes sense if they're eternal beings and you'll all one day stand before the throne of God) -- and materialist science makes it seem wrong to lie about something as plainly obvious as certain genes just being plain bad.
I guess a faster way to say what I'm trying to say is that I think Scott is smuggling metaphysics in when he posits a friend Lance who's superior to him in every measurable way. It assumes a Measurer sitting on the throne of God, who thought-experiment Scott is pretending to be. Either that or Scott really does have a friend named Lance and they spent 5 or 10 years going through an enormous battery of every single test ever devised to compare two human beings. Which he didn't. So it's imaginary, and therefore not subject to the real historical contingencies of life, and therefore smuggling in an eternal perspective not limited by those contingencies.
And I guess it's possible, also, that Scott's willingness to say "Lance is taller / faster / stronger / smarter than me" but not "I am inferior to Lance" could represent a refusal to accept the eternal thought-experiment comparison of the inferior / superior distinction; an insistence on grounding in actual measurement rather than metaphysical quality-juggling.
Okay, exactly-three-sided pentagons, then. Oceanfront property in Colorado. Pick your utterance that's grammatically legal but doesn't represent an existing entity because of incorporating properties that can't coexist.
I like it directionally - my only beef is that it's a little overly passive for me in a stoicist sort of way. I don't think I've ever had an interaction in the genetic superiority/inferiority conversation where I or some neutral third party asks "is N/S inferior to Lance?" in some kind of objective way, and I have to fight my own worry about it.
My interactions (including on this board) invariably have taken the form of someone boorishly arriving in a public forum and announcing "I and people of my IQ have given society everything, and people with lower IQs than me are fit only to serve me and do manual labor!"
If this kind of behavior does cause a person to question their own self esteem, then this kind of "haha you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you make me depressed" approach makes sense, but I think it also makes sense for the public forum, upon the arrival of the boorish guy in question, to discipline him by loudly and resoundingly rejecting him socially until his behavior improves.
On the whole throne of God thing, my take is that if we could all look at every possible outcome in every possible world there’s some sort of emergent universal moral law that you can only perfectly observe from outside of time and space. Under that highest moral law, you are equal.
In some of those worlds, the dice rolls are different enough that you and Lance are effectively reversed. Maybe you stay static and he suffers some debilitating trauma as a child. He looks up to you and in some dark moments he envies your life. But you know, because you can imagine those other worlds even if you can’t inhabit them, that the situation *could* have been backwards. What you are, really, is a pattern executing across time and space. That’s the highest thing you are, definitionally, because it is what makes sense of your atoms from one moment to the next. Coalescing out of dust here, collapsing back into dust there but some eternal pattern that could self-recognize. So that eternal pattern is equal because in infinite worlds you had every chance for you to be equal or unequal in every allowable permutation.
Anyway this is nuts and I’m not even sure 100% what I mean by it. I had a whatever you want to call it experience once, and after that my take on Many Worlds is as described. The structure of reality is set up so that we all get every possible chance allowed, within the confines of us still being recognizably ourselves. The pattern itself is the highest reality.
My personal resolution to this kind of thing is to say that the reflexive desire to compare and rank things is really the heart of the problem.
Of course, it does happen that we need to draw some kind of comparison in order to make a decision. But as the example with the parachute suggests, it ... doesn't actually come up that often. It seems more like an inclination born of peoples' need to construct or evaluate a social hierarchy, or otherwise order their world. And you can decide to do less of that!
I think the plane one is before we part ways. I think there's genuinely a real-world ethical sense in which every human being deserves to live equally. Unless Lance's goodness makes his survival instrumental to saving more lives down the line, I'd say the ethical thing to do would be to flip a coin for the parachute.
I'd offer an alternative concept that we can throw in here - "dignity."
People can vary on all sorts of axes in terms of strength/weakness/social utility/etc, but still be deserving of treatment with equal dignity as a human being.
It doesn't offer much in terms of a self esteem boost - falling back on "Lance is faster and funnier and richer and stronger and better looking than me but we are of equal dignity" isn't going to insulate me from feelings of inferiority, so it doesn't solve for the "I feel low status" side of the equation, but it does help from a "setting rules and policy as a society" perspective. If a society recognizes that (A) a person with a genetic condition that prevents them from running and (B) a person who lacks that condition and can run just fine, are nevertheless possessed of equal dignity, such a society can set a reasonable standard that "being able to run" is an important qualification for being paramedic without going full nazi and asking why the person who can't run is permitted to breed (or live) in the first place.
"Sure, okay, whatever, people can be better than other people in every measurable way and maybe there's some benefit to determining which people that is. However, historically even trying to ask that question has led to the worst decisions the human race has ever made so let's not."
"Another possible answer: fine, in every real world test we can dream up, Lance is superior to me, but there’s still some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something."
Well, we *are* all equal before the throne of God, so there you go. Lance is not more of a human or more in the image of God than you. And no matter how morally good Lance may be, all have fallen short and are in need of the grace of God. I'm fully human, you're fully human, Lance is fully human. He may be better or have more desirable qualities in a lot of ways, but he's no more human than the smelly drunk in the gutter.
I know, here is where we go on about souls and everyone rolls their eyes, but we really are faced with the problem that either we do say "X is better than Y by all these measurements so X is indeed superior to Y and should have all the rights and privileges and get the last remaining life jacket", or we agree to have double meanings as in "okay for the cystic fibrosis test we will say that X is better than Y but for the are you a Nazi test we will say there is no difference".
"Article 4. Whether the image of God is found in every man?
Objection 1. It would seem that the image of God is not found in every man. For the Apostle says that "man is the image of God, but woman is the image [Vulg. glory] of man" (1 Corinthians 11:7). Therefore, as woman is an individual of the human species, it is clear that every individual is not an image of God.
Objection 2. Further, the Apostle says (Romans 8:29): "Whom God foreknew, He also predestined to be made conformable to the image of His Son." But all men are not predestined. Therefore all men have not the conformity of image.
Objection 3. Further, likeness belongs to the nature of the image, as above explained (Article 1). But by sin man becomes unlike God. Therefore he loses the image of God.
On the contrary, It is written (Psalm 38:7): "Surely man passeth as an image."
I answer that, Since man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature, he is the most perfectly like God according to that in which he can best imitate God in his intellectual nature. Now the intellectual nature imitates God chiefly in this, that God understands and loves Himself. Wherefore we see that the image of God is in man in three ways.
First, inasmuch as man possesses a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men.
Secondly, inasmuch as man actually and habitually knows and loves God, though imperfectly; and this image consists in the conformity of grace.
Thirdly, inasmuch as man knows and loves God perfectly; and this image consists in the likeness of glory. Wherefore on the words, "The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us" (Psalm 4:7), the gloss distinguishes a threefold image of "creation," of "re-creation," and of "likeness." The first is found in all men, the second only in the just, the third only in the blessed.
Reply to Objection 1. The image of God, in its principal signification, namely the intellectual nature, is found both in man and in woman. Hence after the words, "To the image of God He created him," it is added, "Male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27). Moreover it is said "them" in the plural, as Augustine (Gen. ad lit. iii, 22) remarks, lest it should be thought that both sexes were united in one individual. But in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature. So when the Apostle had said that "man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man," he adds his reason for saying this: "For man is not of woman, but woman of man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man."
Reply to Objections 2 and 3. These reasons refer to the image consisting in the conformity of grace and glory."
This "image of God" stuff is emotionally very satisfying, but practically inapplicable. If there's a massive fire, and I have a chance to save either Scott or Lance but not both, then I have to make a choice. And I have to make this choice now, in this life and not the next. I could refuse to make that choice (e.g. by flipping a coin or electing to save neither person), but that is also a choice. The fact that both Scott and Lance are equal in the mind of God can help me live with the choices I'd made, but it doesn't help me *choose*.
If you have to choose between rescuing Scott and Lance, then which of them is nearer the door? Which one is easier to save? Which one is the one where there's a better chance of both of you making it out?
Unless you're in a Buridan's Ass situation, I think most people will make calculations like that. How about if Scott and Lance are on the ground floor, but there are five cute puppies on the first floor? Are you the kind of monster that picks Lance over the puppies? 😁
> Are you the kind of monster that picks Lance over the puppies?
Yes. Yes I am. Now, if they were kittens, that'd be a different story...
Anyway, choosing between rescuing Scott or Lance is obviously a contrived situation; as you say, there may be many other factors involved. Still, in life (this Earthly one, at least) we are always making these sorts of calculations. If I'm looking for a new programmer to add to my team, do I hire Scott or Lance ? If I have a box of kittens that need a home, do I give them to Scott or Lance ? Do I vote Scott or Lance for the municipal undersecretary treasurer position ?
I'm obviously not trying to provide an exhaustive list of options; rather, my point is that the idea that "all are equal in the mind of God" is completely unhelpful in making these, or in fact any other kind of choices. When rescuing people from the fire, I must judge their proximity to the door, their weight, their chances of survival if unaided, their auxiliary kittens, and yes, all other things being equal, even their expected value (if you disagree, imagine that you're choosing between Scott and Jeffrey Dahmer instead). Their equal value in the mind of God simply does not influence these decisions in any way.
"Their equal value in the mind of God simply does not influence these decisions in any way."
It does if we go "Well, I *could* have saved Scott, but who cares about that genetically inferior loser? Let him burn, better for the world all round!" even when it's not a choice between "save him or save Lance".
That's the problem underlying all the discussion here: way too often, "genetically inferior" is taken to mean "absolutely inferior and worthless and not deserving of consideration as a human".
But then the fact that both Scott and Lance are equal in the mind of God is still irrelevant, since you're not facing a choice between Scott and Lance any longer, but between Scott and... I don't know, a pineapple maybe ?
<i>I'm obviously not trying to provide an exhaustive list of options; rather, my point is that the idea that "all are equal in the mind of God" is completely unhelpful in making these, or in fact any other kind of choices.</i>
The history of the eugenics movement suggests that your answer to the question "Are all equal in the mind of God?" does sometimes have major real-world ramifications.
I'm not sure if that's true. On the one hand, the eugenics movement is primarily infamous for their totalitarian policies of e.g. forced sterilization. I think today most people would agree that such policies are incredibly destructive; but, on the other hand, if all are truly equal in the mind of God, then presumably He has no opinion on the topic one way or the other.
On the third hand, though, if there was a button that said "guarantee that your own child would be born without any horrible genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis", then I'd hold down that button as hard as I could. And if there was a knob I could turn that would make my child smarter, or stronger, or more resistant to bee stings or whatever, then I would seriously consider turning that knob (modulo any side-effects).
<i>I'm not sure if that's true. On the one hand, the eugenics movement is primarily infamous for their totalitarian policies of e.g. forced sterilization. I think today most people would agree that such policies are incredibly destructive;</i>
In the first place, the US, and most of the western world, had various eugenics laws on the book, and didn't suffer incredible destruction as a result. Of course, you could say that forcibly sterilising some classes of people is just inherently destructive, but I don't see how you can do that without holding either that all are equal in the mind of God, or some secular substitution thereof.
In the second place, about the only opposition to eugenics at the time came from religious people motivated by the belief that all are equal before God. If believing in equality before God lets you avoid incredible eugenics-related destruction, whereas everyone else has to actually go through said destruction before realising that eugenics is a bad idea, that's still a pretty major real-world ramification.
<i>but, on the other hand, if all are truly equal in the mind of God, then presumably He has no opinion on the topic one way or the other.</i>
No? If all are truly equal in the mind of God, the natural conclusion is that he doesn't want us to forcibly sterilise whole categories of people, not that he has no opinion on the matter.
You are equal to Lance in the sense that God loves you equally and Jesus died for your sins just as much as he died for Lance's. This isn't unreachable or indefinable. You can view the enduring popularity of the message that all equal in a secular society detached from its true grounding as either because the truth of Christianity is built into human nature or because we haven't yet fully shrugged off outdated superstitions according to your preference.
There's a pretty mainstream view, which I subscribe to, that God is willing to accept everyone into heaven, but some people choose of their own free will to go to hell instead. The idea is that when you sin you damage your own soul such that you're less capable of wanting goodness, even for yourself.
To love someone means to will their good as an end in itself. So, if your friend is sick and you love them, you will do what you can to help them recover, pretending that they're not sick wouldn't be an act of love. The same applies with sin: God loves the sinner, which means that he wants to help them repair the damage that they've done to their soul. It doesn't mean that he pretends that sin is fine.
By the same token, it's hardly fair that some people are locked up in prison for years while others freely participate in society and enjoy all kinds of liberty and good things.
Just because they torture-murdered fifty hookers, I mean c'mon now, is that any reason?
No, God will not think less of you as a human. As a sinner who causes harm to themselves and others, that is repugnant to God. As a human who has fallen? All can repent and be forgiven.
You see, you yourself are here categorising some lives as worthy and human, and some as unworthy and inhuman, hence it doesn't matter what we do to them - legal torture is fine, starving them to death is fine, death of a thousand cuts is fine, because they're not really properly human like Ives Parr is.
Then you had better hope that AI, if it becomes the big smart cookie people are hoping will happen, does not share your values.
Because such an entity will be able to say "I can do all that any human can do, and do it much better, and that is not even considering the things only I can do". All humans then, of whatever grade, will be the 'genetic inferiors' of the AI, so why should it bother to keep these poor suffering and, let's face it, violent and murderous apes alive? A quick merciful death, then a superior life form can inherit the light cone.
It's dangerous to talk openly about the general value of people. So society is full of mechanisms to help us steer around that topic. "We deserve equal rights" is one, and "you're a Nazi" is another. They don't hold up to examination, because value is still a real thing, but they make adequate conversation-stoppers if indeed someone wants the conversation to stop.
Direct value talk is a threat to society because it destroys the illegible hierarchy where everyone is allowed to feel valued and content. A legible hierarchy would bring us back to chimp world, where there's no peace unless everyone is perfectly happy with their rank at the same time
Direct value talk doesn’t necessitate a legible hierarchy if value is computationally intractable. If the value of a person can only been seen, say, 100 years after their death (due to sufficient time for a legacy of consequences to develop, including offspring and people influenced), then any social hierarchy is merely some hypothesis about future value.
"...some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something..."
This will obviously depend on one's religious convictions. But at least for me, the following statements about human equality don't seem "unreachable" or "indefinable":
1) All human beings are made in the image of God, and are valuable from being so made (not because of wealth, IQ, skill, or even virtue).
2) All human beings (save Christ) have sinned and require forgiveness to be reconciled to God; this forgiveness cannot be earned by good works, but is only available through faith in Christ.
You know when I first got to New York after grad school I was so damn broke that I tried to donate sperm. I went in and they saw that I was white and 6'2 and I told them I had a PhD and they were very very excited. And then they asked if I had any chronic medical conditions, and I said "haha, well, funny story, have you heard of bipolar disorder?" and that was that, I was out.
Now the weird thing for me is that, had I donated sperm and it was used to create embryos that were (let's say this was possible technologically) tested and found to pass on bipolar disorder, and those embryos were destroyed for that reason, many people would call that eugenics. But simply screening me out of the process, very few would call eugenics, even though since whatever the truth about bipolar disorder it's not mendelian, so the odds of me producing a bipolar embryo might not be that high, whereas the tested embryo we know has bipolar disorder. So, like... why is the one OK and not the other?
Exactly. What’s the benefit of consistency in beliefs? Does it help you make more money or more friends or more success at work? Arguably it goes against all of those. The only reason it might make sense is if “being aligned with reality” were more important to you than “success at an assortment of different goals with no underlying unity.”
Oh, I don't know. When I take those online moral/ethical tests beloved of the university departments which set up the trolley problems, I get great satisfaction out of being consistent in my beliefs all through and getting the shocked result of "You monster!" at the end.
Me: Why yes, I am going to apply Catholic social teaching principles and moral theology all the way through on your little gotcha! questions
Them: *Shocked Pikachu face* But... but.. don't you care that we're calling you a monster?
Me: Nope! In fact, that's the fun of doing these quizzes! Because if I were not consistent, you'd be smarmily informing me that I'm a hypocrite and the only way is Essex, sorry I mean, the only way is to adopt *your* moral philosophy so as to have the One Correct Answer for all conundrums ever after. Feck Judith Thomson and her dandelion seeds, *I* say!
Interesting, I guess there’s the additional work of producing the embryo? I’m not sure this is true, but I imagine they have quite a few men willing to donate sperm and can afford to be selective even if it doesn’t make sense
Because it's like the trolley problem: inaction (not selecting your sperm so not creating embryos with it) versus action (creating embryos with your sperm then destructively screening them). In the first case, no embryos are brought into existence, so there is no choosing between them as to which is "superior" and thus wins the right to develop into a pregnancy, so it's not positive eugenics.
Of course all of this hinges on the word "inferior" and I think that Scott's usage is slightly different than mine. You can of course use it to talk about quality ("Yugo is inferior to a Cadillac") but when applied to people, my immediate interpretation is about social status, especially as conferred by social structures (government, culture, etc). The dominant cultural concensus is largly egalitarian, so this usage is nearly always distasteful.
I don't think it's unreasonable or inconsistent to say "cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease and sounds much worse that not having it" and at the same time say "someone with cystic fibrosis is not geneticially inferior in the following sense: my opinion of them, and their standing in society does not (or should not) depend on their genetic disposition". In fact, I think I agree with both statements.
You're not alone Noah. I'd suggest that almost everyone would agree with both statements. And I believe they are right to do so.
The great irony of Scott's argument here is that he has bought into the very premise I think he means to disagree with. The people who argue that cystic fibrosis (or autism, or being born with one arm, or who suffer from any other condition or disability) are not "inferior people" are correct; they aren't "inferior" or in any fundamental way lesser beings. But that doesn't mean their conditions or disabilities aren't things we should try to prevent or correct.
The fact that I can't carry a tune or that I have become a portly doesn't make me an inferior person to Bono or Brad Pitt. But that doesn't mean I don't think that learning to sing or being more attractive wouldn't make me a better version of myself and that I wouldn't jump at the opportunity to make it so if it were easily possible. They are just different axes.
My friends, as genetically flawed as they are, are better than Lance because of my relationships with them. Shared time, human bonds, deep love. That's what makes me a superstar in their worlds, too. (In addition to my many fine qualities.)
Read Part 2: "I still think there's a deeper question here, of WHY questions about inferiority seem so compelling." I don't find these questions compelling. Why not? Relationships. The person I've known for 20 yrs is so much more interesting to me than Lance, however fabulous he is.
It is a meaningful and important question. If one of the "inferior" embryos somehow slips through the screening and develops into a baby which is delivered alive, then what? Do we treat that baby with the undesirable traits as if they were the moral equal of the healthy baby?
Right now, society says "yes we do", in large part because of what Scott describes as the unsatisfactory state of "before the law you cannot be disadvantaged".
But it's very easy to go along a series of steps, once we start becoming first familiar and then comfortable with talking about "genetically inferior", to move:
(1) It would be better if that baby were not genetically inferior
(2) That baby will have a worse life than the healthy baby
(3) This is objectively true
(4) The objective truth is that this baby will have an objectively worse life
(5) It is the objective truth that it would be better if this baby were not alive
(6) It is the objective truth that it would be better if this baby were killed
People right now balk at the sixth step, but throughout history and different cultures they did not, and if all we have is the "really unsatisfying....claim about ... “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases'" to rest our objections upon, given that we have scrapped "utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something" in favour of objective measures of better or worse genes which objectively give better or worse lives that promote or reduce suffering and sadness as how we classify human lives, then it won't be so difficult to get society over the hump of accepting the sixth step. It's science, after all.
And you will think that is a better world, and I will think that is a worse one.
"If we start saying "a healthy kid is better than a kid with cancer" we might fall down the slippery slope to killing children!"
We're sliding right down that slope, Ives, all in the name of mercy and compassion and, of course, "such decisions should be between the patient/those responsible for them and their doctor":
"I worked both in pediatric and neonatal intensive care units, with minor populations who are not eligible for physician assisted death. I witnessed intractable suffering in newborns and accompanied families in the passage of their child’s death.
It made me uneasy to know that what had been recognized as an appropriate type of medical care for adults facing intolerable suffering caused by an irremediable condition was not available for minors facing the same situation. I felt that children suffering was not given the same consideration as adult suffering. I understood that the prohibition of MAiD for minors was conceived as a mean to protect them. However, in clinical practice, I often felt that minors were extremely protected both by the concern and advocacy of their parents and by the knowledge and supervision of the multidisciplinary medical team (including nurses, physicians, social workers, etc.). A total ban to MAiD for minors did not seem necessary and regulatory mechanisms to allow its provision in extreme circumstances were called for.
…. Some children whose death is certain and who could benefit from MAiD are left to endure intractable suffering. Being exposed to such situations first-hand led me to want to understand the legal framework underlying them."
If I had to pick an embryo? I wouldn't. I'm Catholic, I'm in agreement with the ban on IVF etc. (I locked horns previously with Professor Friedman on this). "But if you don't pick an embryo, there won't be a baby!" Well then, there won't be a baby:
That's the whole bunfight right there - are we being objective, though? How do you make an objective measure? Is it really plainly obvious that X, Y and Z *are* 'better' and are 'objective'?
"Nothing I have said indicates that I want to kill children."
But why not? We're pushing the logic of the proposal as far as it will go. If a life is objectively worse, because it means slowly dying prematurely in pain and agony, then it is both licit and moral to prevent such a life coming into existence, correct?
Fine, but what about such lives already in existence? Do we now shrug our shoulders and say "Too bad, you are condemned to such a future"?
Canada is exploring such concepts, or at least some Canadians are, in regards to "Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) for infants of less than one-year of age with a terminal illness that causes intractable severe distress":
Of course, the ignorantly sentimental and religious public were horrified by the very suggestion, but give it time.
It's not about what you intend, or I intend, or well-intentioned people intend. It's about how things slip, loosen, fall away, and then we end up with "but how were we supposed to know it would come to this?"
Do you think the people campaigning in good faith for decriminalisation of homosexuality and an end to the Blackmailer's Charter envisioned marriage being re-defined to "any two persons of whatever gender can marry"? Do you think the humanitarian minded in Germany who were concerned about the suffering of those too physically or mentally incapable to have meaningful lives free of pain and misery thought that the merciful euthanasia they supported would end up as a dress rehearsal for the death camps?
...given the choice between you having a short but mostly happy life before slowly prematurely dying in pain and agony while your children watch, and a complete stranger who would otherwise not exist having a full long and happy life in your place while your existence is excised from the timeline, which do you choose?
The term "genetic inferiority" is a red herring. Inferior/superior are value judgements. A less inflammatory term might be "genetically disadvantaged" although there is some messiness even around that. One copy of the gene associated with sickle cell anemia gives you resistance to malaria. It takes 2 copies to give you the condition that will kill you.
I dunno, it seems to me like the question of "genetic inferiority," is really just a vague way of gesturing towards a bundle of different things. If I had cystic fibrosis, I would say that I was genetically inferior in the sense that it's really bad *for me* to have those genes. It would be better for me to have all of my genes except this one that gives me cystic fibrosis. (maybe that's not a cogent idea on certain plausible theories of personal identity; I'm open to that possibility, but in that case we could just say that it's worse for people in general that I, with cystic fibrosis, exist and not someone who does not have it and would be happier for longer).
But when it comes to say, American football (which I am garbage at and my brother is pretty good at), I think I would say that I was "genetically inferior" in the sense that certain things outside of my control (height, arm reach, lopsided legs, etc.) but me in a position to be worse at this activity relative to someone else. This doesn't really bother me, though, or seem cancel-able in either case, at least once you actually break down what the question is getting at. (Whether or not people would actually do that part is another question).
Not that I disagree with Scott's analysis, but the whole question of whether Lance is better than Scott (for certain specific categories of health, strength, intelligence, etc.) is based on the absurd idea that individuals are always *in competition* for resources (food, money, reproductive success, etc.). For the most part people are networks of cooperation. Indeed, the whole (evolutionary) advantage of living in groups of hominids is that the flaws and advantages of each individual can be (at worst) be canceled out by the group, or at best used by the advantage of the group. Og is good at making fine obsidian cutting tools. Gork has the dexterity to make fine fish nets. Furp got mauled by hyena when he was little and he can't hunt very well, but even though he can't cover a lot of territory quickly, he's death with a spear in his hand. So Furp stays home and guards the children while Og and Gork go out hunting and gathering. The power of culture is that groups enhance the abilities of individuals. (And because Furp stays home, when the women come back from nut gathering before Og returns from hunting and Gork returns from fishing, Furp might get laid more often and have better reproductive success than Og, Maker of Sharp Pointy Things or Gork, the Master of Fishing.)
Sorry to be sexist in the analysis. Many (most?) hunter-gatherer societies are matriarchal, and there are all sorts of female-female, female-male, and male-male dynamics that my sexist simplistic example ignores. ;-)
There have been a few posts taking a religious angle toward this problem. After 11 years of education at various Catholic schools and universities, the concept of "human dignity" has been drilled pretty deeply into my brain. Combine that with five years in American public schools and being steeped more generally in the American origin story (defeating a king, "all men are created equal," etc.) and I'm also quite egalitarian. So I bristle very strongly at the idea that anyone is better than I am, even though I know objectively that some are faster, taller, better-looking, etc.
I don't know why the concept of "human dignity" seems to be that difficult to arrive at for the atheist grey-tribe utilitarians of the ACX sphere. Religious belief might help you arrive at the conclusion that (in the words of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights) "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights," but it seems to me that an atheist could believe that while still acknowledging that people have different abilities.
"If people who hurt innocent children for sadistic pleasure are created in the image of God and are worthy of respect and dignity, then the word has little meaning."
Because they are still humans, and humans are worthy of respect and dignity. They may deface the imago Dei within themselves by their actions, but they cannot destroy it wholly. That is not in their power.
And when we being to distinguish between humans as being "less" or "more" human, or deserving/undeserving of respect and dignity, we start down the path which ends in the sadistic hurting of children for pleasure - because they're not fully human like me, they're not worthy of respect like me. The sadists have that distinction between "those worthy and those unworthy" firmly fixed in mind, we should not imitate them in that.
We're all shipwrecked and clinging to the life rafts, it's all or none of us.
"I don't know why the concept of "human dignity" seems to be that difficult to arrive at for the atheist grey-tribe utilitarians of the ACX sphere."
Because when you do away with all that dumb stuff about souls and humans being more than just another species of animal on this planet and sky fairies giving Bronze Age rules, then you are left with physical matter and how that is expressed according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. No magic consciousness mind separate from the lump of grey matter encased within your skull. And that hits right up against the "some people *are* smarter than others" (as IQ is often fetishised) hence all moral worth gets reduced to "who is the smartest?" and that becomes "the smartest is best because most productive" and there we go, you cannot seriously claim that Flipper McBurger with a minimum wage job and 90 IQ is just as good as Richie Techbro who is CEO of a multibillion dollar company that is going to colonise Mars and give us practical telepathy, right? If we're gonna talk about "human dignity" there, we have to say that Richie is more "human" than Flipper and thus worthy of, and deserving, dignity because he's creative and productive and is growing the economy every year while Flipper is just a drain on resources. I don't make the rules, that's nature, man.
This is a large part of why EA ever got off the ground, I feel, because they're trying to restore the concept of human dignity by dressing it up in "no, this isn't dumb religion carry-over, we swear, it's respectable Utilitarianism which involves maths, not blind faith!"
The word "dignity" came to prominence in the 17-18th century, and got even more prominent after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, after the 2nd Word War. Just in terms of the history of ideas, I think it makes more sense to see it as an attempt to give a secular, abstract name to the general idea of people being inherently respectable and worthy just by virtue of being human. Rather than depending on them, it's part of the project to rebuild an ethical language that does not rely on religious or metaphysical beliefs.
“ I would submit that the best definition of equality that makes sense, is actually true, and captures what we mean by the word is this: when we say people are equal, what we mean is that they all have a subjective experience, that they are sentient beings. that everyone, regardless of their other characteristics, has their own inner qualia, such that if you hurt them, there is not a mere machine that goes through the motions of being in pain, but an actual consciousness there to experience it. To say that all men are equal is to say that no one qualia’s internal experience is inherently more valuable than another’s. While we might trade off among the competing goods of each person, we are acknowledging that their wellbeing is something to be traded off, that it is a valuable thing that can only be justly traded for more of the valuable thing.”
If I were to rewrite it today, perhaps I would just sway “when we say people are equal, we mean their utilities should be equally weighed.” And declare the problem trivial.* But in this particular case, you could maybe get away with saying that you shouldn’t discount people’s utilities just because they have bad genes
But if we ever find out what causes consciousness, aren’t we back to the same problem? Lance is taller and better looking than us, and is also capable of experiencing greater utility
"To say that all men are equal is to say that no one qualia’s internal experience is inherently more valuable than another’s. "
But then we run smack into the Lance problem: Lance is capable of deeper and richer understanding and appreciation of the arts and sciences, he experiences things more profoundly, he has higher heights and deeper depths compared to the person mindlessly playing rap in the background while on their phone sexting a random chick they hooked up with while drunk last night.
Can we really say that Lance's interior life and Slackjaw's interior life are equally valuable?
>when we say people are equal, what we mean is that they all have a subjective experience, that they are sentient beings. that everyone, regardless of their other characteristics, has their own inner qualia
Well, there are certainly bodies with human DNA for which this statement isn't true. Given enough CNS damage (I'd guess roughly equivalent to being in a persistent vegetative state - but this isn't my field, so this is a _guess_) they (it?) doesn't have a subjective experience. This _is_ a corner case, but it happens.
I think the answer to the overall "genetically inferior" question (in a world without tricksy journalists) might just be "It's computationally intractable."
Basically, answering that question would require looking at the whole genome of each organism in question, and perfectly predicting the performance of each gene in every possible environment, and averaging it all into something like a survival probability for each organism. Even for a civilization with perfect knowledge of genetics, that seems like a really computationally hard problem. Maybe you could make it reasonable by pruning out genes with negligible impact or extremely improbable environments, or something, but you're still going to have enormous error bars on the calculation. I don't think our civilization is going to know enough about genetics to make that calculation worth doing any time soon. (And resolving the "morally inferior" question between you and Lance requires processing an even greater number of variables, and there's not even an unambiguous value function like survival probability you could use to resolve the comparison.)
It's also worth thinking in terms of whether it would be worthwhile to use gene engineering to convert one genome into another genome. I think it's obvious that "genome A" is always going to be "superior" to "genome A, except with the cystic fibrosis mutation," just because you can convert the second to the first trivially (relatively speaking) and get a straightforwardly better survival probability. On the other hand, it intuitively seems pretty silly to replace individual A's whole genome with Michael Phelps' whole genome (or whoever). If nothing else, each individual change you make in that process might put you in some intermediate state that's drastically worse than either endpoint. And even if you could do whole-genome replacement perfectly, you wouldn't want to do it for an entire population, just because genetic diversity in itself has quite a bit of utility (since the optimal genome for each possible environment is different). So even a genetically-optimal population is probably still going to want some kind of stochastic genome-generation process (e.g. sex) operating, even if it's perfectly reasonable to make spot-corrections to individual non-optimal genes on an individual basis.
What I'm getting at is, "individual A" versus "individual B" in their totality is never really going to be a useful comparison, since completely transforming A into B is probably never going to be a useful thing to do. The useful question is "Does B have particular genes which could be transferred into A to create a better version of A?" Similarly with the moral worth question. Asking "Is Lance better than me?" isn't a helpful question. Asking "Does Lance have traits which I could adopt to become a better version of me?" might be.
Did anyone kinda feel this way about Leopold on the Dwarkesh podcast? Sure, he graduated top of his class at 19, but I’ve memorized more underwater basket weaving techniques
As I see it there are two definitions of the word 'Inferior.'
The first definition is Inferior (Literal) : Lower in station, rank, degree, or grade. lower in place or position; closer to the bottom or base. of comparatively low grade; poor in quality; substandard.
From this definition, I would agree that the person with cystic fibrosis is 'inferior' genetically than someone that does not have it.
The second is Inferior (Nazi) : This person needs to die and I want to kill them.
According to that definition, I would not say that they are genetically inferior.
Genetic inferiority is an interesting phrase because I've never heard a similar phrase used in another context. I figure that means that it's rarely used literally and almost always used Nazi.
"Lately we’ve been discussing some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior?"
"Inferior" is perhaps the wrong term. "Undesired" is perhaps the more accurate term here.
The whole discussion still smacks of ghoulishness, the worst bits of eugenics.
Yugo will teach you patience, humility and to accept transitory nature of reality while Cadilac will make you addicted to comfort and teach you that pay-to-win is an ok approach to dating.
The Japanese have this concept called oubaitori, inspired by the variety of blooms in their springtime. It's made up of the kanji for cherry blossoms, plum, peach, and apricot, combined into one word. The idea is to celebrate diversity and non-comparison: it's silly trying to decide which of these blooms is best or worst, they're each beautiful in their own ways.
As to Lance, he sounds like a good normie, while you're the guy who wrote Unsong, so I would gladly give you the parachute.
> The Japanese have this concept called oubaitori, inspired by the variety of blooms in their springtime. It's made up of the kanji for cherry blossoms, plum, peach, and apricot, combined into one word.
I was unable to document this by using English-language wiktionary or jisho.org. I was also unable to document it by searching Japanese wiktionary for 櫻梅桃杏. Out of an abundance of caution, I also searched Japanese wiktionary for 桜梅桃杏. No results.
I do see several results for 桜梅桃杏 if I accept the top suggested query "桜梅桃杏 意味" on google.co.jp.
One thing that bothers me here is that these are obviously not kanji for blossoms, since blossoms don't get their own kanji. 桜花, a cherry flower, is a cherry blossom; 桜 is a cherry tree.
To the extent that the Japanese have this concept, it does not appear in their dictionaries and their most prominent online interaction with it appears to be asking what it's supposed to mean. Who actually has this concept, and who said it included kanji for specific types of flowers, which don't exist?
I was going to ask if this might be something in the style of a Daoist magical talisman, with many characters combined into one superglyph, but the google results for "what does 桜梅桃杏 mean?" tend to suggest that it isn't.
That would explain the phonetics 'ri', but 李 are plums, not apricots.
桜梅桃李 has one gloss on English wiktionary, "to be yourself". Jisho doesn't recognize it at all. Japanese wiktionary doesn't recognize it at all. This isn't a more compelling set of results than the original set. The top suggested Japanese Google search for 桜梅桃李 is "桜梅桃李"; "桜梅桃李 意味" has been demoted all the way down to fourth.
The second, oddly enough, is "桜梅桃李 中国", suggesting that it's seen as a foreign concept, but I probably shouldn't read too far into that.
Ah, it was a one-shot conversion from おうばいとうり on my phone keyboard so I hadn’t put any thought into OP’s claims about the characters.
A search for just 桜梅桃李 on duckduckgo gave me a Wikipedia (not wiktionary) article followed by a bunch of “what does this mean” articles. While the claimed etymology is from old poetry, the meaning ascribed to it seems to be more tied to the teachings of a sect of Japanese Buddhism.
I cannot read a Japanese article (as you might guess from my initial search, I'm more familiar with Chinese), but Google Translate seems to indicate that that article provides some citations for the phrase, with the identity of the first mentioned tree showing some variation, and glosses it as just a reference to different types of trees, the kind of thing you might use to describe scenery.
I'm amused by Google Translate's choice of "In the first half of the 13th century, when the term "Sakuraume Touri" [桜梅桃李] began to be used [...]".
Somewhat weirdly, 日本国語大辞典 has an entry for 楊梅桃李, with plenty of historical citations from the Kamakura period onwards, but doesn't have an entry for 桜梅桃李 [Edit: This is wrong — see my reply to Michael Watts below.], even though the latter seems far more widespread online. (Of course, it's understandable why the latter would become more popular — how could you possibly have a list of blossoms that omits 桜?)
The Nippo Jisho entry is of particular interest, since it suggests that Japanese people were always a little unclear on the issue of exactly which flowers the phrase was supposed to refer to:
Do 桜 and 楊 share their pronunciation? In modern Mandarin they're ying and yang, though having presented it like that I should note that despite what the spelling might suggest, yang begins with a Y sound and ying doesn't.
This appears to more or less faithfully reflect the Middle Chinese pronunciations, where 楊 still begins with a Y and 櫻 begins with what I'm guessing is a glottal stop.
> The ancient Japanese idiom, Oubaitori, comes from the kanji for the four trees that bloom in spring: cherry blossoms, plum, peach, and apricot.
If it were an ancient Japanese idiom, I would have expected the Japanese to know about it. The fact that apricots aren't featured in the spelling doesn't fill me with confidence in the articles, either.
If you were trying to document the existence of an ancient idiom going "YOLO", how would that be relevant?
It doesn't express the word, any phrase that might develop into the word, or the sentiment behind the word.
If you want a currently well-known poem matching the meaning expressed by YOLO, I'd go for "gather ye rosebuds while ye may", but again that's completely uninformative as to whether or not YOLO existed at the time, or what it might have meant.
I think there's a more general critique to be made, towards modern anomie. We've only got one life, and one death: what do we do with them? Pointless thrill-seeking is a luxury.
"As far as I know, there’s nothing good about cystic fibrosis."
There is a tiny benefit, actually. My mom has CF, and as a result of the mucous thickening in her lower intestine, she's had about 40% of it removed completed as a result of various blockages. An unintended side effect of this is the ability to eat literally infinite food of infinite caloric density and never put on a single pound of body fat. She eats cookies, ice cream, burgers, pizza, all sorts of shit all the time and never gains weight.
She can't breathe and the medicine keeping her alive at 51 years old costs 60% of her income every month, but hey, she can smash a pizza buffet with no guilt!
"There are certainly people who are better than me in all the usual measurable ways. I have a friend who is smarter, richer, more attractive, more charismatic, and better at helping others than I am. Let’s call him Lance. Am I inferior to Lance?"
Supposing, as you later do, that you are inferior to Lance in every measurable and quantifiable way, then... yes?
But if you're talking with someone who treats "inferior" as synonymous with "worthless" or some equally self-negating or self-destructive term, then that's the issue. Lance may be awesome, and you may be less awesome in every (measurable) way, while still being pretty awesome - there's a lot of room to be a good and worthwhile person, while not being the best person the laws of physics permit. It's about being OK with being imperfect. I don't think "I beat myself up over every way in which I am not matching an ideal I have in my head" is a reason to taboo the word "inferior". It might be worth it to notice if you're engaging in a thought pattern that usually makes you sad/depressed, and use your internal use of the word "inferior" as a red flag for that thought pattern, so you can interrupt it... but a person with healthier thought patterns (note: this could be you later!) who could handle the idea that they are not perfect without freaking out about it and thinking maybe they shouldn't exist then, could just sort of go "yeah, person X is better than me, all things considered, and person Y is worse than me, and this is day 19,227 of my quest to become better over time, which in general seems to be working out OK, everything's fine".
I think the best answer to "am I inferior to Lance?" is "yes, but remember, that's fine, most people are, and I'm pretty good", rather than "haha, trick question!". Unless, for you, "yes, but that's fine" is not a thing you're capable of thinking at this time.
> This is also how I feel about genes for schizophrenia and genes for low IQ.
At this precise moment in the piece is where I think there are real counter-points to make. I agree that Schizophrenia is a bad condition to have in general, but the problem with the psychiatric model here is that it only thinks pragmatically. It does not think in some sort of idealistic or creative way. It's rather rigid, rather "This on the surface doesn't seem to work so we'll say it doesn't work".
The whole point of schizophrenia in evolutionary terms is as a survival strategy. It's often a terrible one, sure, but... in some cases of infinite "game space", you are simply not getting out of whatever sticky situation you're in, without some random thought that goes something like, "They must have implanted technology to read my thoughts". That's the strong suit of schizophrenia. That tiny bit of nuance of course is not to go off the deep end and just declare that we should turn everyone into schizophrenics, but it should at least give some sort of pause. Even the most subtle pause. That nuance is important, and has been sorely lacking in psychiatry(with a very rich history of moral atrocity).
Now take low IQ or better, learning disability. How could learning be *bad*? Isn't learning good? More learning, more better, right? Surely. Except... when you're a (often malevolent) dumb monkey species like we are, it turns out there are lots of things we teach, and lots of things we learn, that are actually pretty shit. Take pause for a second and notice how utterly oblivious to this fact we tend to be. We just *assume* we must have things figured out. Many of these errors we don't even realize right now, and may never realize. So being slow to learn can be disastrous for... just getting socialized, or finding a career, or doing the kinds of pragmatic "basic" things humans value, but it can also be highly protective towards not having one's brain infected by bullshit. That is a big part of why children are so intellectually magical-- they have not been corrupted by bullshit in their ignorance, and so they have this wisdom to them that many adults lack. This wisdom will unfortunately be beaten out, or drugged out, or otherwise neglected out of them as they grow up.
Science waves a magic wand and all genetic abnormalities now have pharmaceutical interventions that allow people to live mostly-normal lives. They're not cures, they're just pills/injections/creams/whatever with some minor side effects that make it possible for afflicted people to live into adulthood, maybe even old age. It might take ~100 years for the magic wand to take full effect, but we're getting there. Who could object to this?
A lot of people who normally would have died young and horribly (XSCID, EGFR mutations, etc.) will now live mostly-normal lives. Sounds great. They'll live long enough to reproduce, meaning the next generation will be slightly more genetically enriched for that specific condition that requires lifelong pharmaceutical intervention. Multiply that by thousands of genetic predispositions. Not a problem for the next generation, maybe, but what happens 100 years down the road? There will be no end to how many new genetic conditions we can unintentionally create through effective medical intervention.
Perhaps medicine is generating its own future demand. Someday everyone will be wholly employed in keeping humanity from sinking further behind, so that all our advances in AI just get subsumed into the eternal treadmill of genetic catch-up.
Another wave of the magic wand gives us the power to remove some deleterious genes from the next generation - one birth at a time, and hopefully through voluntary means in most countries with advanced healthcare systems. Maybe you have the CFTR mutation and don't want your kid to have to take medications their whole life. It costs money and it's inconvenient. Don't forget about the side effects. So the same magic wand that lets us accidentally enrich genetic abnormalities also allows us to diminish them. Great! Except that's not how natural selection works. Genetics is a spiderweb of Chesterton fences with unpredictable results.
Nobody would delete something essential on purpose. But any genetic meddling effectively requires omniscience to understand whether that Chesterton fence is safe to pull down. The magic wand doesn't come with omniscience. We're like the wizard's apprentice. Having stolen this wand, we don't know the trouble we might cause, trying to make our lives better. Most of the worst consequences will be felt long-term, though they seem like natural decisions at the time. Perhaps some Nobel-winning medical advance dooms humanity. There's no telling to what extent this magic derives its power from the proverbial monkey paw.
Should science/medicine stop waving the magic wand? We could stop seeking cures and just let natural selection take its course. Maybe modern medicine is a generationally slow-acting curse. If that's the direction we want to go, though, we have to draw the line somewhere. At what point are we interfering with natural selection versus doing the kind of medicine nobody should object to?
Is there a line? Antibiotics seem like they should be fine, until we remember that this gives some people an artificial advantage they might otherwise be selected against. Those advantages accumulate over time. Maybe antibiotics are slowly putting humans behind in the eternal genetics arms race against bacteria. Someday we'll be wholly dependent on artificial means of preventing routine infections from killing us, and it will be our own doing that backed us into that corner.
Who gave humanity this magic wand to begin with, if not nature and her process of selection? Any intervention necessarily 'interferes' with natural selection, except to the extent that nature selected for humans to have big brains and social structures that allow us to come up with scientific interventions in the first place. Of course, selection has always been a guess-and-check process that takes many generations to finish the 'check' step. Maybe high intelligence and social coordination can go too far, and will be selected against in the long run.
Erm... we already have the technology to read and store genetic information outside of DNA, and then implement it as DNA again. Effectively, a "save a copy before modifying" step. So if we make a bad change, with sufficient technology, we can revert the change.
So it's like having a monkey's paw, that sometimes (often) actually does good things instead of always bad things, and also if it does a bad thing you can go "oh, that isn't what I meant" and hit undo on the situation, with some collateral damage.
If you've got an undo button, you don't need omniscience to get to good outcomes and avoid bad outcomes, even in a hopelessly complex environment. If you pull down a Chesterton's Fence accidentally, just put it back up again. Probably a good idea not to give 100% of the population identical genetics in any particular aspect, but even if you do, just make sure to keep backup copies of the genetic variation the population used to have. Worst case scenario, you spin up some copies of a much older version of the genome, and start optimizing from quite a lot further back, avoiding the paths that led to problems the first time around. So you have the kind of "omniscience" a time traveler who could retry any timelines that went badly would have - not knowing everything, but not doomed if ever a decision goes badly.
1. I don't think most of this is technically or practically possible to date. Or maybe even ever. It's the genetic equivalent of a command economy trying to order a chaotic market.
2. If you're constantly restoring your operating system to a previous state, you're dooming your species. Genetics isn't an OS circa 1995, largely disconnected from the internet. It's a constant race, where if you don't patch the most recently discovered vulnerability you're likely to be taken over by invasive new approaches.
3. It's true that we're just beginning to discover ways to proactively alter human genetics, which could be the ultimate 'solution' to these problems. Of course, this is like writing about the future of technology in the 1850's, imagining a future where we establish interplanetary ambassadors to the Martians by the year 2000, or perhaps mass starvation when global population expands to 500 million people. It's hard to accurately imagine the problems we can't solve in the future, or the solutions we'll accidentally stumble upon. It's probably not a good strategy to get ourselves into a situation we have to innovate out of or die as a species.
4. I agree that you don't want everyone doing the same genetic thing. This means the biggest risk in genetic tampering is allowing either strong social pressures to enforce strict genetic norms (e.g. Gattaca), or strong governmental pressures to drive genetic conformity.
RE: 1: Sure, a lot isn't possible today. But, your original comment was speculating about what would happen in the long term, and we have the beginning of a "save DNA, then restore" technology, in that we can read off DNA and store the pattern of As, Cs Gs and Ts digitally (with some error rate, but it's getting better over time) and we can take a series of stored DNA bases and create synthetic DNA with that base-ordering (short strands right now, but again, if we're looking at the longer term future, that will get better). Getting the modified DNA into cells or modifying DNA in situ is difficult right now, but your look into the far future supposes it will happen easily in time, and I think if we get to that point with the technology, then we will likely get to the point where "take a stored base pair sequence and modify someone's or some embryo's genes to match" is a thing we can do. Certainly if we don't kill ourselves but do keep on with the tech advances for 100 or 1,000 years, we have a shot at it, I'd think.
As for it being a "command economy", that doesn't follow. If the technology to control someone's genetics is widely dispersed and not controlled by a central authority, people can act on local information. It's just, instead of variations happening because radiation hit a molecule or some brownian motion disrupted DNA replication or whatever, they happen by someone saying "I want this variation". Both could go poorly, but the first one has almost no chance at all of going well, most random mutations are bad. So the analogy isn't between "market economy" (no central control) and "command economy" (central control), it's between "prices, supply and demand are set by rolling dice" (no control) and "market economy" (no central control), with a "command economy" option available I guess if anybody wants that, although I don't know why anybody would.
Re: 2: Fair point, there could be an issue installing old code. Except, it isn't quite an analagous arms race. Humans as-is would totally and almost immediately lose the arms race if the race was between the genetics of bacteria and viruses (which change quickly, often on a scale of months to a year) and the genetics of humans. The arms race is bacteria and viruses vs. our immune system, which learns and changes quickly. Swap out some genes but keep the immune system intact, and you're probably OK.
Re: 3: Yep, this is all pretty speculative. But I don't see how it follows that we're necessarily getting ourselves into a situation we have to innovate our way out of
More broadly, it seems like we're in a situation where technology (medicine) and compassion (a desire to keep people alive even if they wouldn't be without medical intervention), have fixed some immediate problems (diseases and things that would kill hunter-gatherers before they reproduced) while storing up some problems for the future (increased mutational load). The way I see it, either more compassion + technology (genetic engineering) or less (go back to no medicine) will work to solve the mutational load problem - but the latter is really unpalatable, so we'll go with the former. We're not in a situation where we have to innovate or die as a species. There's always the option of "no medical care for anyone, only those who can survive without it, survive" - that would just be a really unpleasant outcome, only likely to be taken in some catastrophic scenario where medical care isn't available. But it would deal with the mutational load.
As for your story of us in our non-omniscience changing a gene we shouldn't have, and thus intelligence potentially being selected against in the long run... I don't feel like that holds up. I mean, it's not as if the process that got us here was wise and benevolent, nature is good and technology bad. The process that got us here was nonintelligent, random and not aiming at anything at all, with no care for human life. Engaging in a process that does involve some foresight and planning and is aimed at improving human life, doesn't seem likely to do worse than that. The risk in my mind isn't that we're not smart enough and so we make an unwise change and everyone dies, maybe we would have been better off without the monkey's paw of technology. We're in a universe where random changes to our genetic lineage, almost all of them negative enough to not get passed on to future generations, have happened for millions of years. If an unwise change was likely to kill us all, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Unwise changes are getting made all the time - that's where the problem of mutational load comes from.
The risk isn't that we're "selected against" by natural selection. It's that we do a thing that kills us. I don't think it's likely to be some ill-advised genetic change, because we'll have the capacity to undo that, even if for whatever reason we decide to apply it to everyone, as unwise as that seems. In fact, it occurs to me that, if someone has a genetic problem not present in either parent (a new mutation, an increase in mutational load) given a copy of the parents' genomes and the child's genome, it should be possible to compare them, narrow down the differences, pinpoint the problem... and then revert the change. Figure out what the genetic sequence would have been, and that's the sequence that gets passed on to future generations, by whatever future tech we have for gene editing. That won't make it easy to deal with present problematic mutations, but it could make it easier to deal with new ones, with no risk of knocking over a Chesterton's Fence that wasn't already knocked over in the parents.
4: I mean, an engineered pandemic seems potentially really super bad... but homogenization is also an issue we'd have to watch out for. But if we have control over our genes, and can save copies and restore diversity as needed, then by homogenizing extant human DNA, we're not homogenizing our possible future DNA. Seems like a good idea to maintain copies of diverse DNA in living humans, though, still - like saving heirloom seeds. Which... the fact that we can do that and they don't immediately die due to more advanced viruses and parasites, even though they may be from hundreds of years ago, is another line of evidence that genes from hundreds of years ago aren't like Windows 95.
All very good points. I think the biggest area where our concerns differ is in the question of whether this kind of tool gives too much potential power for central control to create massive vulnerabilities for humanity. I think before the most recent pandemic I'd have been more willing to shrug and say "different people/societies will do different things", and let time and selection take their course.
I very much agree with this part of what you said, "technology and compassion have fixed some immediate problems while storing up some problems for the future. The way I see it, either more compassion + technology or less will work to solve the mutational load problem - but the latter is really unpalatable, so we'll go with the former."
I do think it's possible to get past a tipping point, where you can't return by just allowing natural selection to reduce mutational load, but that's all pie-in-the-sky theoretical. Without a concrete example to work from, we can't know either way.
I'm also not convinced we really understand much more about signaling cascades than we did back when we were irradiating cells to cause mutations and see the outcome. There's a lot of theoretical work to do, without a lot of progress in the past 30 years other than those signaling cascade charts people love to put on posters and presentations. This is what I mean when I say I'm concerned we'll get ourselves into a situation we'd have to innovate our way out of. We know how to screw up the system with current or near-future tech. We don't know when we'll make the kind of breakthroughs that are required to actually understand the system we're tinkering with at a fundamental level.
It's possible we'll always be able to roll it back, like you suggest, though not guaranteed. If all this happens at an individual level, that sucks for some people, but the species survives. Writ large is where the systemic problems come from. I guess if there's always a North Korea or Venezuela that will march to the beat of their own drum humanity will survive.
One final point: inconsequential and/or deleterious mutations that persist for a long time until some day they accidentally combine to create something beneficial is one of the proposed mechanisms for how complex systems arise. If we take manual control of the process, we might be missing out on this kind of future adaptation, since we'll be incentivized to clear out exactly that kind of non-beneficial mutation. In the near future, that puts humanity on a straight shot up to the local maximum, but keeps us from the kind of random walk that could help us discover higher non-local maxima.
In the long run, if we get good at genetic manipulation, enzyme prediction, protein folding, cell/systems signaling, etc. we could potentially design much more complex systems and jump to the kind of non-local maxima that would be unlikely to develop even under evolutionary pressures. That's a long way into the future, given current theory/technology, though.
I guess I get hung up on the "if" part, where we take manual control now, knowing this creates a far-flung vulnerability that we hope future generations will be able to solve. Do I believe technological progress will continue apace to the point where that kind of thing will be trivial long before the problem becomes apparent? Yes, with a high degree of certainty. Would I risk the species on being right about this question? No. But then I guess if I'm making decisions today that won't impact humanity for millions of years that somehow gives less weight to those concerns.
Sure, contingent on "successful outcompeting". What if AGI selects itself out faster than biological humans select themselves out? That'd be an unexpected turn of events.
Interesting that we mostly see intelligence as an obviously pro adaptive trait ... except for maybe there's a Great Filter, where too much intelligence dooms you. But if it dooms humanity, why wouldn't it also doom non-human intelligence?
>Interesting that we mostly see intelligence as an obviously pro adaptive trait ... except for maybe there's a Great Filter, where too much intelligence dooms you. But if it dooms humanity, why wouldn't it also doom non-human intelligence?
Well, if it dooms humanity _by way of_ us building our successors, it might be that any of:
a) Maybe AGI gets to the limits of computation allowed by physics, and it has no successor
b) Maybe AGI version 1 builds AGI version 2 (and so on), but copying goals/"values"/metrics is a smoother process for AGIs than for the human->AGI transition, so AGI version 1 doesn't consider it a doom.
c) Maybe AGI version 1 builds enhancements, but they are essentially "bolted on", rather like subroutine calls, so AGI version 1 doesn't consider it doom.
>What if AGI selects itself out faster than biological humans select themselves out? That'd be an unexpected turn of events.
Umm, what mechanism do you have in mind for selecting itself out? Humans have a demographic transition, where many of us (myself included) have decided that there are activities that we prefer to reproducing - but we also age. Unless some sort of bit rot is unavoidable, I wouldn't expect AGIs to age.
Some have speculated that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent civilizations tend to collapse before they can become interstellar, and before they can accomplish interstellar communication. In order for this to be an explanation for the Fermi Paradox, it can't be true that a civilization is selected against because they create a more successful successor. If AGI had happened elsewhere in the galaxy, we should presume it would have taken over Earth long before humans arose.
(Sorry, I know many of those concepts are tangential to your original comment.)
Many Thanks! Yes, I agree that AGI replacing humans is not a solution to the Fermi paradox. My personal guess about the Fermi paradox, given that life seems to have arisen on Earth very early in its history, is that one of the later steps, maybe eukaryotes, maybe multicellular life, might be very rare, or that worlds with enough water for life, but not _so_ much water that there is no dry land, might be very rare. Smelting iron underwater is difficult...
Maybe. I'm always skeptical of path-dependent arguments such as these. The implication is that our only example of intelligent life capable of tool manipulation is also the only possible way for intelligence to rise to the level of interplanetary and (aspirationally) interstellar exploration. Organic chemistry seems to suggest that water, carbon, nitrogen, etc. work well together in the manipulation of covalent bonds to transform solar energy into complex systems. But that seems like an oddly specific requirement for something so general as 'intelligent life' to develop.
Like you said, life on Earth developed very soon after it became possible for it to do so. It's difficult to estimate what other forms life might have been able to develop had exponentially growing life from our lineage not already been competing for space and resources on the planet.
It's useful to drill down into the actual meaning of a word and see if the word is useful. These types of questions (are you genetically inferior?) have a connotation that is associated with the word "inferior" which is false. "X is inferior" has the connotation that X can't add value to the world. Jim is an inferior mathematician compared to Terrence Tao. Does that mean that Jim can't add value to the mathematical project? No. Does that mean Jim should quit doing mathematics? No. The only consequence of this state of the world is that if Sam wants to collaborate with someone on solving a mathematical problem, Sam should probably choose Tao instead of Jim, if Tao is available. If Tao isn't available, then choosing Jim might very well be useful. The sentence "Fred is genetically inferior because he has cystic fibrosis" is trying to imply the meaning, "Fred can't add value to the world because of the consequences from his genetic code," which is manifestly false.
Even supposing some sort of weighted ranking of human beings along every dimension (which is generally a useless idea), the person at the bottom of this mythical ranking can still add value to the world.
And in case anyone is wondering what "to add value" means, I take a generous view of that. If one can achieve a "better" state of the world, then one is adding value. So even someone who has locked-in syndrome can add value. They can create a better internal state within themselves than would exist in the world if they were dead. So ultimately, the use of "inferior" in relation to human beings is a useless idea. Banish it from one's word usage patterns. We can all add value to the world.
Because of the work I do I've make a number of people who are not better than anybody at anything. As the general rule such people are very often treated really horribly, and my job was to try and keep that from happening. My personal answer to the question are these people inferior is fuck you for even asking.
"The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases." This is ridiculously reductive. The Declaration of Independence declares the existence of a form of equality, of which not being disprivileged in court is one consequence. It claims that form of equality is a natural law and that is the main reason for creating a new country with a new system of government. The revolution that installed that system of government inspired revolutions all over the world, and today's internal law generally considers that form of government the only fully legitimate system of government, to the point where most non-democracies at least half-heartedly pretend to be democracies. Even if you don't find this form of "equality" compelling, you should put some thought into why so many people have and do.
The real question is not "who's inferior". The real question is: who's richer, has more power and is more happy.
- If you can afford a giant mansion on Malibu beach but Lance can't, then you're superior.
- If you've got "all of those politicians that you carry around in your pocket, like so many nickels and dimes" and Lance doesn't, then you're superior.
- If you're happy about your life and enjoy every single day but Lance doesn't, then you're superior.
All the truly superior people live on Malibu Beach, sip their $5,000 bottles of champagne, host fundraisers for famous politicians and wake up genuinely happy every single day. The other 99.9% languish on obscurity and have to deal with all the discomforts a Malibu Beach person never has to.
How about this as a summary of what you're trying to get to here:
"My utility function and everyone's utility function treats your positive utility as being of equal values to Lance's positive utility. We do and should value your happiness and well being equally. We treat all people's positive utility as being equally important irrespective of anything else, with a special emphasis on not valuing anyone's utility more due to immutable inborn traits."
I think that statement lets you aboid all the bad Nazi behaviors without saying we shouldn't try to reduce the percentages of people that are born with cystic fibrosis
If you ask me if I should save Lance over you, I respond in two different modes at once:
1) Utilitarian / rationalising / constraint solving: This is a terrible situation but there's a clear right choice to make.
2) Agape / humanist / emotional: All humans are valuable and unique souls. Any death is a tragedy. What right have I to choose between two irreplaceable individuals?
I still save Lance (sorry), but I think (2) is *important*. If I were choosing between Lance and a cow, I would feel bad for the cow but wouldn't feel any sense of conflict.
I think that there's a correct, right, just impulse in us that says that even if (in mercenary terms) some people have more impact, there's also a sense in which every person is part of the tapestry of life and any attempt to compare people in absolute terms is reductive. If we were perfect rational agents, maybe it wouldn't be an actionable impulse — but as satisficing, flawed decision makers it serves the crucial function of making me try REALLY DAMN HARD not to throw anyone under the bus or leave a man behind.
Perhaps one life is worth more than another, but humanity tells us every life is worth *a lot* and you have to check a lot of significant figures to find the difference.
I wonder how culturally universal these considerations are. In a hierarchical society (e.g. feudal Europe) everybody believed that some people were more valuable than other people. Indeed, does this argument even play in modern Europe?
This post exists in a very odd space where several thousand years of moral philosophy seem to be largely absent. While popular and utilitarian notions of value may be reduced to such criteria as wealth, attractiveness or charitable giving. A superior morality grants moral status to those who possess the capacity (or fact) of being able to experience certain qualitative states. A concept that should be familiar to EA who are concerned at the suffering of clearly “inferior” species (shrimp will not win any contests against Scott’s superior friend). Religious and most virtue ethics systems arrive at the same place via the “soul” or “logos” as well. Which leaves me with a simpler contention. Scott knows all this. Which means he really is committed to a purely utilitarian notion of moral value. And that version really is a nightmare that does lead to dismal outcomes. It’s a world view where the guy who wins the lottery is REALLY better than you. Instead of the world nearly everyone wants to live in. Where your moral value is equal to all others who share with you the state of being conscious and being able to experience all that this entails (feelings, experiences and, for most, the ability for reasoned thought). Put simply the fact that you are an individual and on that dimension have moral equality with any other individual. I would add that this morality is not only more aligned with most people’s instincts and desires but it’s also instrumentally superior. For Scott’s alternative is utterly incompatible with creating highly pluralistic and cooperative societies. Because I’m a world where whether you get the life jacket depends only on your bank account or social media followers is a savage and inhuman battleground where collaborative strategies are consumed by Nietzschean fire.
As others have said, I have no qualms in agreeing that some people are superior to me in all sorts of ways that matter, and who would deserve the last parachute before me. We're dealt a certain hand in terms of genetics, inherited culture, upbringing, etc., and on top of that we put more or less effort and wisdom into ourselves, and choose to go in certain directions or others. And as others have said, it would be a pretty poor experience not to have anyone to look up to!
In a way, I think coming to peace with a certain sense of limitation or disappointment in life is also a hallmark of integrating the wisdom of middle age. The possibilities no longer seem endless, and all sorts of ways of propping up an exaggerated self-esteem by thinking "I might still do X" start falling by the wayside, and that is actually a good thing.
But Scott seems to be pointing at the interesting point that this is in tension with the widely held idea that it's somehow important to think that we are all "equal" in some sense. It's quite at the core of classic Western humanism to consider each other as basically equals, even though the concept breaks down as soon as you start looking at it in terms of any concrete sense of value or achievement.
We can think of this as a cultural abstraction. We talk of people having rights, such as the right to property or free speech, but "rights" are cultural abstractions, they are not found anywhere in nature or in any kind of logical necessity. However they are not a fiction, because they actively shape the culture in ways that have a direct impact on our actions and attitudes. If we didn't have the cultural notion of rights, we wouldn't get righteous anger when those rights are not respected. But we do have this anger, and we collectively accept and find it normal that other people have it too, which shapes our society in a certain way. So the abstraction of "rights" is in the end shorthand for a set of attitudes and expectations, which our culture has adopted and found beneficial.
I think the idea of equality works in that same way. It's shorthand for the expectation that people ought to be treated at least somewhat fairly, without having to do anything special to earn it. It's quite close the idea of dignity, as in the idea that the modern West is a dignity culture, which replaced an older honor culture. Its sets a common expectation, and therefore also sets the stage for a common disapproval of anyone who goes too far in exploiting, dismissing or disrespecting another human being.
In the end I don't think it's any great mystery. Shared abstractions have lots of power, that's what culture is basically made of, which makes the bulk of our living environment as human beings.
Which makes me wonder if I'm perhaps missing Scott's point, because what I just said here sounds like a rehash of stuff Scott himself has been blogging about since forever. Anyone?
The two examples used are not the same, not equal. Cystic fybrosis has, predictably, thus far, quite similar outcomes, while schizophrenia does not. The cause of cystic fibrosis is understood, whereas the cause(s) of schizophrenia remain murky and outcomes are quite markedly different, from one individuals to another, even though they’ve been diagnosed with the same disorder. Like Bi Polar and Spectrum disorders (perhaps also some others that affect perception, behavior and personality), schizophrenia can also confer some kind of different perception, in some people, savant or savant-like insights. The brain system and how it affects the mind, in contrast to the example used, cystic fibrosis, unnecessarily confuses the argument, albeit, for me. The moral dilemma question remains. Is Lance better? Maybe thus far and so the parachute analogy works fine, maybe there’s some predictability there. The problem that I find with the analogy is that it’s like setting a lab experiment to predict real life situations. The outcomes from those types of experiments are too flawed often enough for the data to predictable across populations. There are just too many variables and the same is true of those problems of perception, personality and behavior—to many possible variables to predict accurately. And what of hope? Should we then argue that if we could confer hope, we should or should not confer hope? Is hope perceived as bad or good? If we perceive hope as good, wholesale, do we confer hope to every embryo? What happens if hope is conferred in an individual and whomever forgets or decides to not delete the (as yet to be discovered or non existent) gene associated with Malignant Narcissism or the Dark Triad? We don’t have a hope gene, whereas, we do know more about a mutation of the gene that causes cystic fibrosis.
Wait, didn't the post essentially say "Lance is superior to me but for mental health reasons I should avoid thinking about it"? Avoiding asking that question doesn't seem like an easy thing to do, so for many people, the only effective way of not asking that question may be to develop an outlook that, at the expense of consistency, and possibly succumbing to hypocrisy, brainwash ourselves into an "equal value" philosophy.
Can't you just replace "genetically inferior" with "has inferior genes"? The problem with the former is that it sounds like you're making a judgement of the whole person, whereas the latter is clearly just focused on the genes.
Part of the breakdown here is the old classic about group means vs individual performance.
Saying 'it is on average worse to have schizophrenia genes than to not have them' is different from, saying 'this specific person with schizophrenia genes is a worse person than every person who doesn't have them.'
But the phrase 'people with schizophrenia are genetically inferior' evokes *both* of those meanings.
And then the people who interpret it different ways argue forever.
I think there are two concerns here along with a third that's less related to the exact question Scott is asking.
Concern #1: The statement "x is inferior to y" requires some limiting principle, as in "x is inferior to y when it comes to (for example) ability to play tennis." If we simply say "x is inferior to y," then we're bringing in all the baggage, good and bad, that comes up when we talk about inferiority/superiority.
Concern #2: When we use "inferior" and "superior," especially when we're talking about genetics, we invoke a huge number of emotional-, moral-, and value-laden assumptions, histories, and ways of looking at the world. That's almost inevitable. It's almost impossible to talk about genetic inferiority without somehow invoking nazism.
Concern #3: The broader issue Scott is engaging is whether it's okay to terminate a life/potential life on the grounds that it would suffer from some horrible genetic defect. It's not only whether the defect is truly desirable or not or whether it might have some redeeming virtues. I realize that's not the direct topic of this particular post, but it's part of the broader discussion.
You seem to be essentially saying: our attributes can be mapped to points of a complete lattice of all possible human features, and moreover we cannot map the partial order that this lattice forms into a total order in any consistent way. We are therefore all incomparable by any "inferior/superior" order, and the edge cases like the identical twins differing in one gene can be ignored because even identical twins are slightly different in some attributes due to differences in gene expression. I would agree with this argument. Economists might want to disagree (with reference to arguments about arbitrage) but they would be wrong.
Seriously, you’ve pointed out the problem with the question, but seem to be reluctant to just say, “Some people are certainly inferior to others in one or more characteristics. So what? They all should have equal rights (given they don’t infringe the rights of others)."
I think the right answer is that yes; you are genetically inferior to Lance; yes, your life is less valuable than his; yes, this is unfair but it's also true. Just as you can't fly or shoot lasers from your eyes, you can never be as good as Lance, it's just a fact of physics. However, despite not being as superior as Lance you should still strive to do everything as best you can and strive to achieve as much as you can -- because realistically Lance's existence (superior though it may be) doesn't impact you all that much.
Thanks for the thoughtful article. Here's my approach:
First, love the sinner but hate the sin. This is analogous to loving the person with cystic fibrosis, but hating cystic fibrosis. No person should be defined by any single trait, whether it's a genetic condition, a crime in their past, a wrong opinion on one topic, etc. Yet, those single traits can be unhealthy, evil, or false. I imagine most people living with cystic fibrosis would wish to be rid of it, same as how I wish to be cured of migraines.
Second, we each have a role in the body of Christ/society. Not everyone is a brain or an eye or a mouth. If you've been taking them for granted, consider for a minute how valuable your feet are. Janitors and bus drivers are similarly extremely valuable to a school district. Get involved with whatever mission strikes you as the most important and/or best suited to your skills and interests. Then, be content with the role you're given there. If the role is simple, you can overflow your spare time into helping others or learning from them. It will be noticed.
Third, beware of Satan (lit. "the accuser"). Accusing other people leads to discord, not harmony. Accusation and judgment should thus be internal, not external. ("remove the log in your own eye first", "he who is without sin may cast the first stone", "neither do I condemn you"). Declaring someone else to be generally "inferior" or "superior" is a judgment. Don't compare yourself to others. Crush the bricks of arrogance. Be on their team working toward a common goal, each doing what they can. Instead compare yourself to where you were yesterday and where you could be tomorrow.
"If we screen off your impact on the world around you (e.g., how much you're helping others), how sad it'd be if you die?" It's valid to consider all humans to be equally valuable, in the sense that there's a component of a utility function that's just "did this human stop existing" times N utilons; there are other parts that the same variable can influence, but it's valid to talk just about this part.
> I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he's better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have "equal value"?
Improving the lives of others isn't just about how much this increases their ability to improve the lives of even more people. We care about the quality of lives. And we care about human lives not ending. It's ok to care about these things as ends to themselves, and it's ok to assign an equal amount of this sort of caring to all human beings.
(This, of course, leaves open many questions, like would a superior alien that consists of an equivalent of multiple humans, be more valuable, than a human? Is there a coherent way to agree with that without agreeing that some humans might be inferior in that quality? At what age is it no longer ok to eat babies?)
The best justification of the belief in equality that I can think of is political: If we believe we are better off under a political system that does not create a privileged class, then such a system is supported by a belief in equality. That equality is not of the sort that is measurable, but we will talk about it as if it is, because of how sentences work.
Hmm. Obviously they mean something like "moral worth." It's not a claim that everyone is equally good at math or basketball. This seems so obvious that the post itself seems odd to me? Is Scott genuinely confused? Is there some secret message or nuance that I'm missing?
To me, the phrase "genetically inferior" implies that the person with worse genes *deserves* to be worse. That they have some moral failing that justifies their worse genetics.
I'm pretty short and my life would be better if I were taller. If someone told me I was "genetically disadvantaged" or even that I had "bad height genes", I would feel seen. If someone told me I was "genetically inferior", I would feel slighted.
Don't know if that's how others use or interpret the word "inferior".
If you're in a community where intelligence matters, evaluation of members matters.
If member evaluation matters, then some members are going to get disappointing results and some will get very good news.
You cannot have the ability to tell people "you are not intelligent enough to consistently evaluate others ideas" without gaining the opportunities to gaslight them. Likewise, you cannot stroke someone's ego without gaining the capability to pull their thinking in specific directions.
It's a difficult dilemma. We need better communities.
I really like that twitter account. I think part of it is because I'm bad at self talk and reading stuff like that helps.
A way I see "you are not inferior to anyone" is "try the thing you want to do". Sometimes I feel inferior in an abstract way, but sometimes it's "there's no point in trying this, Lance is going to be better/Lance didn't manage to do it", but reading that I'm not inferior to anyone gives me motivation to still do the thing. And doing the thing is usually better than the alternative because I'll be better than the me of yesterday.
“Born equal” and “not inferior” and such, to me, just mean “deserves a baseline level of goodwill and kindness (that’s about average)”. Unlike nazis.
Some people may be more equal than others in the burning plane parachute elections, and there’s probably pretty privilege and such going on in spite of these declarations, but assurance of a high floor of goodwill matters a lot more than where the ceiling is, especially for people worried about being labeled “inferior”.
Humanity is ready to get much, much better at epistemics. There will still be powerful people pushing back.
Humanity is NOT ready for a "public recognition of the significance of genetic differences" revolution. In fact, humanity is SO not-ready for that, that it could severely interfere with the emergence of better epistemics and other improvements.
Perhaps part of our difficulty in thinking about this issue is that our culture, since World War II, has gotten overly spooked about "sounding like a Nazi." Especially the "sounding like" part, which is necessarily vague and discourages clear thought.
As Scott points out, things can be inferior and superior along multiple dimensions. We need unembarrassed acknowledgment that one can notice and affirm difference along some of these dimensions without being a "bad person." Regardless of what some will say this "sounds like."
> Another possible answer: fine, in every real world test we can dream up, Lance is superior to me, but there’s still some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something.
Could we say something like "it is equally bad for Lance and you to suffer, and it is just as morally imperative to reduce your suffering as to reduce his"? (assuming this suffering doesn't impact the comparisons above such as your respective abilities to improve the world). Do you think that's both correct and satisfying?
How about the trollish meta discussion in this debate? Most people's desperate desire to not feel inferior is because of their obsession with status which they regard as existential. And it *is* existential because status impacts how likely you are to replicate your genes. So should we select for embryos with genes associated with less status anxiety? No one would care if they were inferior then. *Insert evil mustache stroking here*
>So should we select for embryos with genes associated with less status anxiety?
That might be reasonable (if feasible). We seem to mostly be able to organize large activities in hierarchies. "Matrix management" approaches have often failed...
I acknowledge the selfishness of this position, but I'm only down for a Brave New World if I get to be Mustafa Mond. Otherwise, I 100% agree with the savage.
Once my basic material needs are met, the only things I care about in this life are art and intellectual inquiry. I'd rather be a dog than a human in a universe with no scientific inquiry and no human art.
Many Thanks! That's fair, everyone has their priorities. Actually, you might not want to be Mustafa Mond either. Remember he said "Happiness is a hard master--particularly _other_ people's happiness."
This is an unsatisfying answer to many but imo the only reasonable one. People are saying that no one is inferior or superior along the axes (as well as the specific ways) the connotations that words like “superior/inferior” carry & that people are concerned about. I.E. having schizophrenia or cystic fibrosis doesn’t make you deserving more of shame, you don’t become more or less deserving of love if you have those conditions or not, it doesn’t make your happiness and life satisfaction less worth pursuing than anyone else's in some terminal utilitarian calculation. A genetically identical twin with cystic fibrosis still deserves to be treated with just as much respect as one without etc.
Once you break down inferiority/superiority/value into different dimensions you can more concretely express that you think beings are equal in important ways across it. For example I personally believe animals are equal to humans in terms of how much their unwanted suffering should be reduced. If I could alleviate X amount of human suffering or 2X amount of animal suffering I’d prefer the later option because I don’t think animals are inferior to humans in terms of moral consideration. If I said something like “animals matter just as much as people” someone could counter with “surely humans have more impact on the course of important events and therefore matter more”. The statements wouldn’t be a contradiction though because we’re talking about a different dimension of the concept “mattering”.
If I say “beautiful people are superior to ugly people and are more valuable too” I can be correct in that they are superior in terms of beauty (duh) and that all else being equal we get more value from them in a way they don’t for ugly people, but wrong in all the ways that statement implies to any average person hearing me say it. I’d be wrong in saying they’re definitionaly more trustworthy and moral (I know the studies correlating the two but it’s not a categorically universal truth that everyone is more moral than anyone uglier than them and less so than anyone prettier than them) or it’s the most important dimension of value or that ugly people should feel less deserving of respect and care in how they’re treated. It would be silly for me to say something like that and then complain people are interpreting me wrong or acting in denial of ways beautiful people are objectively superior to ugly ones.
Likewise most people are just worried about having a society where we see it as okay to treat people with disabilities or disease as if their feelings don’t matter as much or it’s more okay to be disrespectful of them in a way it wouldn’t be for healthy people or that they’re inherently less deserving of certain privileges even if the utilions we get in the end are equal. If someone had a weird condition that made their blood cure cancer in anyone who had it transfused, they would be the most valuable human in the world & they’d be objectively better along dimensions of what they contribute to the world and how much we want to keep them alive versus anyone else but most would argue they’re still equal along dimension of how much respect they deserve, how much compassion they should be treated with, what kind of social status they deserve, how much their happiness and wellbeing is important outside of instrumental ways it affects the value they provide and we also wouldn’t want them to feel less good about/concerned for themselves if their blood lost its healing property.
I sympathize with the frustration of wanting to just improve people's lives through unfairly stigmatized and tabooed practices like genetic modification and be able to get people agree on simple statements like “it’s better to not have genes that make your life filled with more needless agony and suffering, even if you can be better in some other ways than it is to have them.” or “the world would be better for most people on average if we had more smart people than if we didn’t.” but we can’t get there by acting ignorant of how terms like superior/inferior in proximity to health and genetics comes off and then being upset when people worry we’re using the terms in ways they are and have been used by others.
I’d hope most readers of this blog would understand that words and concepts can be areas of high dimensional idea space instead of simple dictionary definitions and that sometimes it’s important to explicitly delineate boundaries between subareas in them.
Sophisticus: Excuse me, do you know the way to city center?
Stranger: You good bro! You’re in city center right now!
Sophisticus: But…most of this area looks pretty low-rise. And the edge of the city is right there – past that boardwalk you hit the ocean. How can this be city center?
Stranger: All of Los Angeles is the city center!
Sophisticus: What?
Stranger: I know it sounds off. Everyone from out of town seems to think Downtown Los Angeles is, you know, *the* big downtown. But then how do you explain the fact that the traffic on the 10 is heavier going *westbound* at morning rush hour? And that’s without even getting into Hollywood and the hills.
Sophisticus: Who would design a city like this?
Stranger: …design?
Sophisticus: Look, I need to get to Urth Caffe, and I know it’s in city center, so if you’re not going to direct me to city center, can you just tell me what part of town Urth Caffe is in?
Stranger: It’s in the center. The whole city is center.
Sophisticus: Let’s try this again. Please point me in the direction of Urth Caffe.
Stranger: There’s one here. There’s also one in every other city center. Melrose, DTLA, Beverly Hills, even Pasadena.
Sophisticus: But which one is the real one?
Stranger: What is this, the Dumb Starbucks episode of Nathan for You?
Sophisticus: By “Urth Caffe”, I just mean an ordinary non-perfect building with a greater-than-average propensity to serve coffee!
Stranger: Then go to Starbucks!
Sophisticus: That’s not Urth Caffe.
Stranger: So go to the Urth here in Santa Monica.
Sophisticus: But this can’t be the unique city center. I haven’t even had to get on the 405 yet.
Stranger: Who told you every city has a unique center?
Sophisticus: Well, there has to be some ranking of the different neighborhoods, right? There’s nothing stopping you from arranging them in order. Are you some kind of radical egalitarian who thinks everything has to be exactly equal?
Stranger: Okay, the city center is Alhambra.
Sophisticus: Alhambra? I’ve never heard of that.
Stranger: I just put them in alphabetical order. Alhambra is first.
Sophisticus: You can’t argue that that makes it central!
Stranger: The alphabet is very salient. Everyone knows about it.
Sophisticus: But it’s not what I was thinking of when I said the center.
Stranger: Look, I picked an ordering. You seem to have a different one in mind. But I am telling you that no one around here uses the one you’re assuming must exist.
Sophisticus: All my European and East Coast friends know what I’m talking about when I say the city center. My own city has one.
Stranger: Wonderful! You can go there! I’m sure they have a Starbucks too. But the ten million people in the place where we are actually having this conversation just don’t rely much on a concept of “unique center” to describe their metro area.
Sophisticus: Wait, I know what’s going on here! The powers that be won’t go around publicizing the geographical center of population, or the midpoint of a circle approximating LA County, because of woke.
Stranger: I could look those up for you. But it’s still going to take you farther to get to the Urth nearest there than it would to go to the one right here. And the zoning isn't going to be any denser there, either.
Sophisticus: Wait, I know you! You’re my old friend Simplicio, who quit philosophy to become a surfer bum.
Simplicio: Not to mention a caffeine fiend and a scriptwriter. But do you see my point, bro? You can lead a person to a total ordering, but you can’t railroad them into adopting it as a salient lens on their world, nor would you want to – if it were useful to them, they’d already be using it. And you certainly can’t jump from “I have an ordering in my head, which is correct according to some metric” to “everyone who disagrees with me thinks I’ve calculated the ordering wrong under that metric, or disagrees with the whole idea of comparing things.” Any metric that’s actually interesting is probably also arbitrary, in the sense that different people are in different situations that select for different value systems. Just because you can pick a unique first neighborhood in the alphabet doesn’t mean you can pick a unique most central neighborhood. Just because you can get everyone to agree with the motte of “it’s better not to have a single mutation that gives you cystic fibrosis, than to have it” doesn’t mean you automatically get to push through the bailey of “therefore, considering the eons of evolution that have given the human species a normal IQ distribution, trading off academic-style reasoning ability against other useful traits, it’s definitely objectively better to have a 105 IQ than a 100 IQ.” And nothing in this argument presumes that intelligence is subjective or impossible to accurately measure.
Sophisticus (glumly): I guess you’ve got me there, Simplicio. Clearly you’re cleverer than me, on top of being better-dressed, higher up in Hollywood, and a superior surfer. If a runaway trolley were hurtling toward you, I’d have no utilitarian choice but to jump into its way.
Simplicio: You’ll be all right. LA doesn’t have public transit.
Sophisticus [cheering up]: Oh, right – where would it even go? The central station?
Simplicio: Exactly. And don’t count yourself out so fast, bro. You’ve got an excellent blog.
One thing that's nagging at me about the idea of generalized genetic inferiority and superiority is that it lacks context.
One hint at the problem is that parents aren't replaceable and can't take care of very many children each.
Another angle is that a culture needs a variety of people. There isn't a single best when you need a mix.
There are a few traits that are just plain bad for people like cystic fibrosis, but there are more where it depends or doesn't matter. Mercifully, we live in a culture that doesn't care about attached vs. detached earlobes. At least there's something.
Consider being AIDS-proof-- it turns out that there are a few people who don't have the part of the immune system AIDS latches onto. They're a little less healthy than most people, but they have an advantage if AIDS is circulating.
It's possible, nay, even plausible, that dropping context is a temptation for smart people. If you drop enough context, you get simple ideas that can be mentally manipulated.
Weird, I never felt bad about being inferior to someone. A good example of someone I feel inferior to is Scott. He’s an incredible writer and likely a great psychiatrist. He uses a large portion of his money to help others and has made an incredible positive impact on the world. Even through my entire life, I doubt I will make as much of an impact as Scott already has, and that’s ok with me.
Maybe I’m ok feeling inferior to Scott because I feel superior to over half the population. Maybe egalitarians feel uncomfortable with that proposition, but it feels natural to me. That is actually why I try to help people. It’s a sense of Noblesse Oblige that since I am superior to most I have a duty to help those that are inferior.
I dunno, it sounds like you just convincingly argued that you're genetically inferior to Lance--and more generally, that people and other living things can be and are genetically superior/inferior to other people and living things.
And the counterargument you give is, "If I accept that claim, either outside people coordinate to make my life bad, or some voice inside my head makes me feel bad." Fine, but what threats people make and/or how you feel is no evidence one way or another about the overall territory out there. If there's a structural "genetic superiority" and "genetic inferiority" relation out there, in the territory, you definitely shouldn't ignore it _because recognizing it makes you feel bad_!
"we might say that eg a Yugo is inferior to a Cadillac, even if the Yugo is better on some trivial dimension like having a slightly longer tire life.)"
People deliberately make Yugos, though.
I mean, obviously there's a difference between 'schizophrenia' and 'schizophrenics.' Nobody wants cancer. People with cancer still want to live and have a right to try. This doesn't seem like a contradiction. People are allowed to see certain aspects of themselves as undesirable, things they would remove if they chose.
(The harder question is when parents go in for ABA and trying to make their autistic kids act 'normal' and the kids say "no, I like how I am. The world is wrong.")
Equal treatment before the law is impressive because it goes against the vast swath of human history, including eugenics, of course. The abstract notion even contradicts lots of American history.
"The good of the many outweighs the good of the few" is fine for Spock to say, in sacrificing his own life. It's a very different statement made by someone who pushes him to his death.
I actually have some personal experience with this, since I was born with certain genetic/biological issues, and some people, including at least one member of my immediate family, have called me subhuman and said I have innately less moral worth than them. And I'm not inferring or paraphrasing anything, I mean someone has screamed in my face the exact words, "You are subhuman!"
My way of resolving this has been to recognize, first of all, that there is more than one metric to evaluate someone's genetic quality, meaning that it's rare for someone to be truly superior to someone else across all categories. However, that still leaves us with the case of Lance. Maybe most of us will meet someone who's superior to us in practically every way that matters. Or if not, we will at least be inferior to some person on each of our traits, meaning someone is smarter, someone is stronger, someone is more attractive, someone is funnier, and so on, even if we never meet someone who is all of those things at once. I'm sure even Lance deals with that problem.
So what it comes down to, for me, is making unique and qualitatively distinct contributions where I can. Sometimes I'll come up with a little joke or wordplay specific to a unique situation. I won't give examples of this, because the amount of context required to see the humor wouldn't be worth reading, and that's exactly my point. A few times I've made a whole dinner table, or even a whole crowded room, crack up, by saying something that wouldn't be understood by anyone who wasn't in that exact room at that exact time. It doesn't matter that many people are funnier than me, or even if funnier people were in that same room, because nobody else said that particular funny thing, and probably never will for as long as life exists. You can replace being funny with being strong, kind, or brave, depending on what the individual situation calls for.
Another example of this would be starting a blog which many people find helpful, or writing a book that some people like. Unsong really isn't my thing, honestly, but it's still a unique contribution to the world which no other person made or ever would have made, not me, not Lance, not Tolstoy or Proust. Asking "well how much literary value does Unsong have compared to War and Peace" is like asking "how many blueberries are worth a banana" or "how much red is equal to green?" There are ways of calculating those values either economically or by personal preference, but still, if every banana disappeared from the world then I couldn't make up for that by eating a billion blueberries, even though I like blueberries better. There is a unique, incommensurable qualitative value in the existence of each and every type of fruit in the world, just like there is to every book, and just like there is, the way I see it, to each and every human life.
So, if there were times (and there were)when someone enjoyed Unsong more than War and Peace, or was really hungry for a banana and ate one, or laughed really hard at one of my jokes, then questions of "superiority" are irrelevant.
This may not be enough to satisfy everyone, but it's enough to keep me going. At least until they come out with androids who really are superior to every one of us in every single way. I dunno what to do then.
This article sets out to answer "And do we really want to do this?" this being ascribing genetic superiority to some beings over others. It seem that the discussion completely misses the mark: context. As I see it, the main reason we might want to avoid saying this set of genes is better than another is a very strong prior that bad things might happen shortly thereafter. This prior is not perfect and perhaps some posts by Scott are rare exceptions, who knows. I would wager that a larger proportion of discussions around genetic superiority are in bad faith or fail to appreciate the potential harms. Those exploring this topic as a game of intellectual rigor are the minority and may very well fit in the aforementioned group.
As a thought experiment: if I hear 99 conversations about genetic superiority that are in bad faith - should I be charitable towards the 100th?
As an intuition pump, if someone is doing gain of function research. I might say "sure, I sort of trust that your lab is safe, sure you seem like a great person, and sure we might learn something, but I am just really concerned about the cases in the past where this went *really* badly. Frankly, I would rather you don't even do this research". If that person then wrote a blog post about the different types of vacuum seals, it would not do much to change my mind and mostly misses the point.
The distinction made, twice over, in this article - whether a genetic condition is medically unfavorable or worse off in physical/intellectual competition versus a 'soulful' judgement of inferiority - points to a slight semantic confusion between what is actually understood as inferiority as opposed to a biological disadvantage. The connotation of inferiority has to do with a human or cultural value judgement while a genetic disadvantage appeals to a 'natural' qualification against some metric, like longevity or utilitarian purpose. Using the term inferiority for a genetic disadvantage confuses, since the metric for inferiority is a social one and not a 'natural' one. These two should only be conflated if the values of a particular society align with a 'natural' judgment of biology, like in Sparta, where the physical dominance and capabilities of the polis were also the main cultural values. Its unfortunate that in the first section of the article, where the comparison between both possible answers was assessed, the biological metric was clearly grasped in the affirmative stance, but in the refutory stance the social metric was avoided or only went so far as "you sound like some sort of callous jerk". This is pretty much as far as modern society is willing to go in talking about social/cultural prescriptions, since the reigning social norm is that nobody has any business in prescribing any social norms: don't tell me what to do or be, and I wont tell you either. If, for example, there existed a society with a culture antithetical to Sparta's norms where, say, localized art or passivity were the social values, then a Spartan in this society would certainly be judged as inferior, in the same way the Spartans judged as inferior those who they conquered on the very basis that who they went against weren't the ones doing the conquering. The article even alludes to this in wondering if the charge of inferiority to Lance could be circumvented by being better than him in some trivial thing, such as 19th century poetry. This question is baked in with the assumption that, to the current society, 19th century poetry is indeed trivial and thus would leave no room for answering no, but does point to the fact that charges of inferiority use a cultural/social metric in its determination, rather than a 'natural' one. Our modern society is nowhere near prepared to discuss, without hysteria, any topic of inferiority, and not because of its own sake but because doing so would first require the fixation of some distinct social norm(s) as positive, distinctly apart from that of 'nature'. Highly-prescriptive pre-modern cultures did have to grapple with this; how much to allow for 'nature' and how much to enforce its norms. There was a constant flux of Hellenistic rulers re-interpreting their states constitutions, which ranged from a 'natural' permissivity all the way to the 30 tyrants. Today, with the modern norm boiling down to the idea that prescribing norms unto others is reprehensible, the ironic conclusion is that the sect of socially inferior peoples are only those who seriously consider if there could be inferiority at all. The twitter post in the second section does exactly this. It reinforces the norm that there is nobody out there with any right to impose a norm onto you, voiding the possibility of inferiority as established in the social sense. The result of this modern liberation has, in turn, been the indirect yet full submittal to 'natural' inequality, now encompassing nearly the entire fraction of social pressures people face. With life, outside of any social goal, being valuable in itself, our culture becomes ever increasingly fixated on youthful beauty, the sexual marketplace, accrual of wealth and territory; all leaving people in the merciless inequality we know to exist in 'nature' since Darwin. Pre-modern enforcement of extra-natural values were the tools, as arbitrary as necessary, to protect society from nature's "might makes right" conclusion. The norms sought to condemn avarice, infidelity, or militance (or promote it like Sparta), and in consequence gave rise to the idea that someone could be inferior in society's eyes. Contrast today's life for life's sake with the traditional Hellenistic wisdom of Silenus as quoted in Aristotle: "It is best not to be born at all, and next to that, to die as soon as possible". This contest between 'nature' and custom will inevitably be fought with much confusion as people seek out to abuse the connection between gene and phenotype. We will need a custom, a distinct positive human value apart from 'nature', if we want to prevent people from being mutated as the fight for "might makes right" reaches its apex.
Your understanding of what we mean by 'Lance is equal to me' seems intuitively very wrong to me. I don't think it's actually a factual claim when people use it, I think they are reinforcing a social norm that helps order society. Similar to how my grandma would say 'Australia is the best country in the world' while also claiming everyone believes that about their country, I don't think she thought they were wrong in any meaningful way and wasn't hostile to foreigners. Team leaders do this a lot as well where they claim 'this is the best team at this company', they are not usually claiming a fact but trying to produce and environment where everyone feels proud and motivated. I understand the statement are structurally different but they give me the same feel, 'every human is equal' gives a feeling of dignity and self respect because people really really don't like loosing status competitions. Most people want to live in a world where they can get that feeling and supporting this statement and associated norms gives them this feeling.
However because it's not really a factual belief most people are willing to set aside the norm is sufficient extremis such as saving children before adults. But the more blatant and the less unique a diversion from this norm the more people feel it threatens the norm. A lot if not most people would balk at saving lance over you, and would see drawing straws as a better solution because it preserves the norm. I don't think most people oppose treating schizophrenia prenatally, but a lot feel the threat to this norm and need to be ritually reassured that this doing this isn't going to weaken said norm.
I don't think its 'trick you into being a nazi', at least when normal people ask the question. It's 'Is that cosplay uniform is from star-wars or the SS? because its making me uncomfortable'
I don't think this is particularly conscious, I seem to notice a lot of human behaviors regulating status and social norm are automatically regulated by fairly base emotions.
I think you are missing a possible answer, and the one which best describes the most common position: "your argument is logically valid, but holding the principle that 'every human's moral worth is equal' and enforcing a norm against people who argue differently is part of how we keep Nazi-ish ideology outside the Overton window, even at the cost of some cognitive dissonance". There's a solid argument that the post-WWII norm against the idea of genetic superiority has been good for the world, especially given that before WWII and the Civil Rights Movement people were generally overvaluing coarse genetic differences.
I think this explains the dissonance of someone encouraging treatment for genetically impacted psychiatric conditions but pushing back strongly on the assertion that having a disorder makes someone "inferior" in any way.
In this sense, people calling you a Nazi might be literally incorrect that you support the Nazis, or even incorrect that supporting genetic engineering is a slippery slope to supporting Nazism. But in a more meta sense they may be right that "public support for these types of arguments are part of what allowed the Nazis to rise to power and therefore you argument should be rejected".
I understand the idea that "instrumental consideration are in some cases more important that the value of pursuing and sharing the truth" is uncomfortable; you've written before about why you think this is wrong and I generally agree with you (for example, it was clearly wrong for the CDC to let instrumental considerations influence their advice on masks). And it's especially bad that the argument isn't explicitly made, so it's more like "instrumental considerations mean that unfair attacks against people spreading dangerous ideas are okay, regardless of whether those ideas are true". But I think you have to engage with this idea to convincingly rebute the arguments and voices against genetic engineering (and a treatise on this question might be valuable; I found the vaguely related https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wS5mprX6BsyeyaNm3/tensions-in-truthseeking-1 after a brief search).
I'm in team get over it. There are multiple scales available and unless you are one of the two in 8 billion people who are top and bottom of each metric, you are somewhere in the middle.
I think the whole thing is driven by sexual selection. Animals want to be attractive, we evaluate mates and competitors, in a kind of animal brain way, the sum of their perceived properties times their felt emotional importance. Then we know which mates to choose and who to hang out with to get the best mates. That's the basic facility. It does involve negative emotion. Culture creates a set of narratives around this grunt level process.
At the animal level, you have a slot on the scale and you try to move up and not fall down. It's just how things are felt to be. In the neocortex world of culture, ideas and imagined alternative worlds, you're position can become a source of disquiet that feeds down to lower the brain systems resulting in anxiety. Then we counteract with a myriad of strategies like telling anyone listening that they are not inferior to anyone. That might give you a good night if you can believe them, but these thing are really just the flip side of status anxiety, so a certain level of strategic stupidity is required.
I'd caution against taking either side too seriously. There are more benign, interesting and useful things to things to focus on if you can renounce this biological drive a bit. And humans are also have this benign capacity for hanging out in egalitarian groups.
The entire framing of this essay confuses me. Let's take another example: Are fluers biologically inferior ("Fluers" are people who have the flu)?
I really do not understand what "inferior" is supposed to mean in this context. I don't think it has an objective definition.
People resist being labelled inferior because people compete for access to and control over scarce resources and opportunities. As one of the critical means of gaining competitive advantage over other people is social status, being labelled in some negative way that other people will buy has potentially very negative consequences. Conversely, being told by a stranger that you are equal to them in every way is reassuring and creates an opportunity to relax for a moment.
When someone is labelled "inferior" a claim is not being made that the person objectively performs at a lower level according to some objective measure. The claim is that the person being labelled is unworthy of respect or status, and should be deprived of opportunities to gain access to or control scarce resources and opportunities.
What I am saying here is that the assignment of worthiness in a human being is a social construct, not an individual one. Status is a in-group membership marker, it's essentially equivalent to being assigned a role within a community. Consequently, it is strategic to be reluctant to accuse anyone of being inferior in some way, because what you are really doing is attacking their in-group. People will be reluctant to risk this unless their in-group has an established, open conflict with the other in-group (ie, racism). Because accusations of inferiority (or, for that matter, superiority) are historically often moves in an inter-group political competition, most people are going to shy away from active involvement, lest they get caught up in some distasteful interpersonal conflict.
"You aren't inferior to anyone" is a peace offering.
I've always assumed that inter-ethnic breeding is good for the gene pool, that families are genetically healthier when they have some diversity. We've all heard the jokes about inbreeding among the fancy people -- buck teeth and bow legs, sexual confusion and drug addiction, etc.
So, am I simply biased in favor of inter-ethnic sex and down on would-be elites, or is there science to back it up?
>The House of Habsburg frequently practiced consanguine marriages as a way of consolidating the dynasty's political power, with both first cousin and uncle–niece pairings common.[178] The most visible consequence of this was an extended lower chin (mandibular prognathism), which was typical for many Habsburg relatives over a period of six centuries; the jaw deformity is so closely associated with the family that it is commonly known as the "Habsburg jaw" or "Habsburg lip".[179] The Spanish branch took this practice to an extreme: of the eleven marriages contracted by Spanish monarchs between 1450 and 1661, nine contained some element of consanguinity.[180] The last of the Spanish line, Charles II—who was severely disabled from birth and possibly impotent— possessed a genome comparable to that of a child born to a brother and sister.
I'm OK with my lowly peasant lineage -- Irish and Polish. The bad news is we're a little crazy; the goods news is we live long (Or is it the other way 'round?).
I have to say I'm not I'm not a fan of this chain of argumentation. Scott lays out a toy example using cystic fibrosis, a simple, crippling, single-gene genetic disorder. Anybody who says that having this genetic disorder isn't inferior, is basically playing a gotcha-game. I guess I'm more-or-less on board for the toy example.
The immediate next step on the chain is low IQ (also schizophrenia). So: to object that people with low IQs aren't inferior, I'm just playing a gotcha-game in the hopes of cancelling people? That's really the extent of my objection?
For one thing I feel like there's a category violation going on here. Cystic fibrosis is a disorder (as is schizophrenia). Low IQ is not a disorder; IQ is a multivariate human parameter which includes genetic and environmental factors, it innately exists across a spectrum and in any situation there will be people at the low and high ends of that spectrum. (as opposed to cystic fibrosis, for instance, a binary disorder which could theoretically be eliminated).
I'm sympathetic to pushback against people who are trying to "normalize" disorders, this approach has obvious downsides (for instance, demonizing treatment options). But IMO establishing some innate characteristic to be used as a proxy for human worth is an incredibly fraught process. I think there's a real concern even when doing genetic selection against disordered genes (cystic fibrosis, Down's syndrome, etc.), that there will be a simultaneous dehumanizing of people with those disorders (and yes, I think it's plausible that that could evolve to include large-scale implementations of measures like sterilization and euthanasia against these populations). I think the problem is magnified when choosing an ordered characteristic like IQ. This chain of logic has been played out in the past to evil effect (yes, since you brought them up, by the Nazis amongst others). And I don't accept that this is a "gotcha" objection to a simple semantic statement. Scott packages, in this article, the idea that low-IQ people are genetically inferior, with 1) the implication that low IQ people would ideally be screened out of the gene pool, and 2) a trolley problem wherein a high IQ person's life is saved over a low-IQ person's life. I guess Scott was trying to be magnanimous by offering up his own life in the trolley problem? this would seem a lot more meaningful to me if he didn't realize full-well where he sits in the overall percentile rank of IQ.
I guess in summary it feels like the cystic fibrosis question is being used as a trojan horse to attack the human worth of people with low IQs. And I don't like that. The question in my mind isn't ultimately about being "made to feel genetically inferior"; it's about the types of fates that the "genetically superior" have tended to impose on the "genetically inferior", and how we can avoid repeating all that.
I don't think you're really answering my objections (but maybe I just stated them badly). Yes the Nazis considered themselves superior based on a different set of innate characteristics, not IQ; it's the underlying sorting of people into inferior and superior groups that I find troubling, whatever the parameter used for the sorting. I don't really care that their parameters were pseudoscientific; the same outcome using scientifically derived parameters seems equally horrific to me (sending schizophrenics & low IQ people to the gas chambers instead?).
Sure I agree that being intelligent is good. I guess what I'm really saying is that it's dangerous to start separating people into superior and inferior categories based on innate characteristics. Scott in this article seems to reject a universal basis for human worth essentially as sophistry; I guess I feel like, if your moral code can't find a universal basis like that, then your moral code is broken and its application is going to lead to dangerous places.
The belief that one's own group is innately superior in some way has been the precursor to many atrocities throughout history. The technologies being contemplated are genetic technologies, which if applied will lead to a genetic segmentation of the population; there are also, of course, financial and cultural components which would favour their adoption amongst some groups and not others. I don't think it's a stretch to believe that their wide-scale implementation could lead to the bifurcation of humanity into a "superior" and an "inferior" group (I don't see any scenario where this type of genetic selection is implemented on a worldwide scale, in the 3rd world for instance, so naturally adoption would only be present in some populations). We already see profound polarization between different groups; adding "genetic superiority" into the mix only seems likely to make things worse, maybe even more so if those claims are "true" in some objective sense (as opposed, for instance, to the pseudoscientific Nazi claims that you referenced).
I agree that saying a disease is bad isn't inherently dehumanizing. But deciding than an embryo doesn't deserve to live based on having a disease - I maintain that this has the inevitable side effect of devaluing people who are living with this disease. As I tried to lay out, this seems to me a separate question from the IQ question, since it's about treating a disorder rather than targeting an ordered characteristic. I'm more sympathetic to this type of screening, I do recognize the devastating impact of something like cystic fibrosis; I'm just trying to point out that it also seems to me to be a fraught subject based on this innate quality of devaluation.
It worries me that you can point to a novel intervention like genetic screening, which to me obviously has complicated and unpredictable downstream effects, and simply proclaim "it is moral". You may be right that it will be a net gain for humanity (which I suppose would be enough to qualify it as "moral" from an EA perspective); but to me, your certainty reads as a failure to consider the many possible negative downstream consequences.
The thing about using the phrasing inferior/superior that triggers a visceral opposition in my own thinking is that inferior suggests not just being lower on a force rank list, but in a whole other tier.
This is adjacent to the inferior in every way but not as extreme. Worse in the ways that matter and worse by enough that you are in a whole different category. And assigning ppl to lower categories feels Nazi-esque. We are comfortable saying pigs are inferior life forms but not the same about ppl. And indeed on the whole spectrum of genetic diversity, the worst human and best human are pretty close, so no ones inferior right?
This post touches upon a conundrum I've occasionally considered. It's a heresy in modern western secular society to say one group is superior to another. It is, as the post says, perceived as the hallmark of a Nazi. But ask someone, say a progressive, what it would even mean to be superior. That is, if group A were superior to group B, what metrics would demonstrate group A's superiority? Higher intelligence? More ethical? Greater longevity? Braver? Better looking? Physically stronger? In my experience, you're unlikely to get an answer. The very question will put you under the spotlight of suspicion. Belief in intrinsict equality between human groups, especially human lineages, is both a modern commandment and a claim that cannot, even hypothetically, be proved. It is a moral claim masquerading as an evidentiary one. Equality to a modern westerner is what the divinity of Jesus was to a Medieval Christian.
I am quite willing to admit that I'm genetically inferior to my younger sibling, certainly IQ-wise and both BMI-wise and ADHD-wise as well. But I take comfort in the fact that if it wasn't for my own birth, then my younger sibling almost certainly wouldn't exist due to the butterfly effect. Still, I also acknowledge that if someone was forced to choose between saving myself and saving my younger sibling, and they could only save one of us, and if everything else about us was either equal or titled in my younger sibling's direction (such as future life expectancy), then they should save my younger sibling rather than saving me because my younger sibling has much more to offer society than I myself do. It's sad but it is what it is.
I also want and hope to reproduce eugenically long-term, but I'll need a lot of money for this and I want to ensure that I will not have a severely autistic kid.
What the discussion is about is his society allocates respect. This is an attempt to raise the respect granted to those with CF. And sure it may not make sense in terms of literal truth but the underlying problem is that humans are evolved to be pretty shitty and we tend to treat those whom society judges to be lower on the status hierarchy worse -- morally we should be more concerned about their welfare but in fact we aren't.
And while I think this discussion is confused, it's at least understandably confused. The problem is that it's very hard for people to distinguish the following claims. Indeed, they have exactly opposite practical social meanings/implications and literal consequences.
1) Its preferable that babies be born without feature X because it makes for a worse life (or whatever).
2) The life of someone with feature X isn't worth as much as someone without that feature all other things considered.
3) Its less important to respect and protect those with feature X.
And the problem is the relationship between these three claims in terms of ideal facts and in terms of practical assertions in society is very different.
For instance, as a good utilitarian I think 1 and 2 are probably true for things like cystic fibrosis. In a trolley problem if I know nothing else about the people on the track I'm pointing the trolly along the track of the individual with the more difficult condition.
I also tend to feel that we ought to be particularly vigilant and protective of those with CF because they tend to be particularly vulnerable, can be subject to excruciating suffering without anyone noticing and historically those with disabilities have been treated super badly.
The problem is that as a matter of social reality asserting 1 and 2 tends to lead people to 3. It's fucked up but we tend to assume that low social status/respect means you can get away with treating someone worse.
I think the right response is to try and limit this tendency but I get the intention.
This is basically a variety of the observation that X group gets treated badly because they are seen as low on the social status hierarchy/respect hierarchy so we can protect them by raising that status.
It's the same way that people try and raise the status of the homeless or a racial minority to suggest we should treat them better.
I'm skeptical of the overall approach because someone always has to be at the bottom. I think we may instead want to work on our tendency to treat those with low status worse but that's long and hard.
In principle its possible to iterate all over possible treatments (raising status of people we like) and find when someone (who we won't like) wiill be at bottom yet the system is stable and everyone else likes it.
>I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance
I may not be reasonable, but I'm absolutely sure that the claim that "any reasonable person would give it to Lance" is wrong, even shockingly so.
Maybe to elaborate on this, briefly - this kind of "Lance is better than me in every measurable way and therefore he is more valuable" goes deeply against the Christian worldview, so I am a bit surprised you treat it as obvious given the fact that western culture has traditionally been steeped in this worldview, even now. But maybe to elaborate - say it's you or a five year old child who will die when they are 18. Do you save yourself?
Lance may be better in every way, but value requires asking: value to whom? To society? To Lance? To Mr. NonLance? If the latter grabs the parachute, we'd judge his act as morally equal to Lance grabbing it, IF we think the standard of morality is each actor's own life & values.
I think the “equal before the throne of God” view is the one most people hold. In many (though not all) modern ethical systems, people have rights that shouldn’t be infringed upon. It’s a straw man to equate this with equality in the eyes of the law (which could be changed by politicians at any time). If you and Lance were on a plane, I think most ethics would object to giving Lance the parachute over strenuous objection from you, though they would differ in exactly what should be done.
As a utilitarian, you can fairly ask why equal ethical values for you and Lance is the bedrock of these ethical systems. But then I really do think you’re open to the “journalist” brand of criticism, that you don’t believe all humans are created equal or are endowed with equal moral value (not saying this makes you a Nazi or whatever, just a utilitarian).
This is the best answer to this dilemma. From a Christian worldview, we are sons and daughters of an infinite being, made in His image. From a materialist worldview, some people are simply Yugos while others are Cadillacs.
I think the common rejection that "some people are just Yugos" is an indication that deep down few people are actually materialists, even if they think they are.
Agreed, especially with that last sentence. In much the same way, lots of people say they don't believe in universal morality...but then go all in on condemning other people for wrongdoing (something very much out of character if you truly believe that what's right for me isn't necessarily right for you). I believe it was CS Lewis that said something to that effect, but it's been born out throughout my personal experience at least.
All humans being children of God is neither sufficient nor necessary to make claims of equal value. Medieval knights who called peasants "men of no worth" were Christians; the Colonel who said of Cheyenne children that "nits make lice" was a Christian*; slave-owners and segregationists in the Americas were usually Christians (as were, to be fair, their strongest opponents). Equality in moral worth does not necessarily follow from everyone being a creation of the same God anymore than it follows from everyone being made of the same elements. And while I suppose that any position of egalitarianism is technically non-materialist, so is any position of hierarchy -- "superiority" is not found in the atoms anymore than "equality" is.
Claims of equal value are a natural and rational part of the Christian worldview. I think to argue otherwise, you would need to point to Christian teachings rather than refer to people who claim(ed) to be Christians.
So called "Christians" may be "Christian" in name only. Or they don't rationally follow their stated beliefs to logical conclusions. (As mentioned above, failure to "follow beliefs to logical conclusions" is actually the same problem seen in many who claim to be materialists.)
First, lifeboat debates are fun, but usually not very relevant to real life. Here's a real example: in the decade before Waymo started actually working I read any number of think pieces on the moral implications of how a driverless AI car will solve the trolley problem in real time. Since actual driverless cars hit the road, not so much. The lifeboat debate of "I've lost control, should I crash into Terry Tesla or Padme Pedestrian" gave way to, we'll design cars that very rarely do either. The necessity of computing human worthiness was obviated.
Second, we do make choices about genetic superiority all the time, with in-utero screening for genetic defects. Among most constituencies this is a non-controversial choice, and it clearly involves a decision that genetic makeup A is worth birthing while genetic makeup B should be aborted. The question is why that is, for lots of people, uncontroversial, when saying "A is better than B" would be somewhat controversial.
I want to suggest that moral questions often get solved piecemeal. This is a historical observation, not a methodological statement. But I also want to make the methodological statement that it's a good practice: a robust and healthy way of finding out the answer to moral questions. In this case, I think we can answer small sub-questions on the edge of the problem, "Is it the case that some gene sets are superior to others, and make the people who are endowed with them superior to others?" For example, we can come to a practical conclusion like, the spina bifida mutation is bad, and in fact is so bad that it is a reasonable choice to abort a foetus with spina bifida rather than have the baby. This practical conclusion can be reached and practiced independently of an overarching theory of genetic quality, and may eventually support the gradual development of such a theory.
As to why we currently resist grand theories of genetic quality, well, that's just because we know that they are prone to going wrong in drastic ways. Avoiding a known failure mode is, again, a reasonable methodological approach to a very difficult problem. It's not necessarily completely rigorous, but I think it's rational.
>I want to suggest that moral questions often get solved piecemeal. This is a historical observation, not a methodological statement.
That sounds plausible (caveat - I'm not a fan of morals in general. I would rather discuss preferences, alliances, and negotiations.).
I think that "piecemeal" is kind-of equivalent to "community standards", and this is a fairly reasonable way of balancing mixtures of preferences which pull in differing directions - sort-of weighted sums, _NOT_ deductions from rigid "first principles".
One problem with this approach, though, is if the "community" is strongly inhomogeneous. If this comes down to legal decisions, and they apply across Woke and MAGA, most likely at least one of the major factions won't be willing to live with the outcome. Similar problems arise with multicultural societies, or across some national borders.
Yep, I think that's a reasonable way of looking at it. The MAGA vs woke problem doesn't worry me very much because I think it's 99% aesthetics, and the actual policy differences between the two are minimal. (Though Texas abortion restrictions are an interesting test case. I'm kinda expecting Texas to hollow out at this point, and become entirely Catholic latino.) But in general, yes, negotiations over preferences are the process through which things get worked out. When you find that there's a community standard or rule that a certain group just can't live with, you make the decision to either oppress them or change. And the positive direction of progress is just deciding to oppress fewer and fewer people.
>When you find that there's a community standard or rule that a certain group just can't live with, you make the decision to either oppress them or change.
Or sometimes there is a third alternative, to partition, as Czechoslovakia did (though this was an unusually peaceful and smooth case).
I think there's sort of a category error here (as also, kind of, evidenced by religion-based comments).
Superior is a relative term and so cannot exist without there being a scale... even in the parachute example, while initially building it up as an example of an absolute value case where we decide who is "superior", you then (unwittingly?) cop out and say the "value" may be that he's better at improving lives of others. But who said improving lives of others matters? It's just, like, your value system, man. Sure, most people would agree it matters when determining how "good" someone is, but that merely makes it the same as e.g. equality before law, that you dismiss - just a system some people devised.
Or in another way, superior without qualifications ("superior candidate", "superior soccer player", "superior spouse", ...) basically presupposes "superior human being", i.e. that you derived a function for a value of a human being. But for such a function to be accepted without falling back to laws of men, you need god or other absolute. There is no god (as far as I'm concerned), so there's no function, so there's no superior.
As a separate point, just to be clear, I am pretty Nietzschean, so I am not arguing this from any kind of leftist/egalitarian perspective. I think the latter argument would be pretty clear (kinda like what deBoer says about judging on intelligence). As for me, the reason parents should be allowed to abort babies with genetic disorders (or anything they want - what if they just hate blue eyes, or tall people?) is not because they are inferior, it's because parents don't owe that baby anything. Ditto for adults... some people might be bad at living a life, along most axes (e.g. the <1% that supposedly commit XX% crimes). They are not fundamentally inferior, we should not judge them apriori; but instead let them naturally starve to death, or eliminate them in the course of harsh retributive justice - based on something they did, not their value as a human being.
The easiest way to get around this is to understand that Lance is worthless without everyone else around him, so how can he be superior ? We are all in this together.
As far as the twitter account resonating with people: obviously a lot of people *do* equivocate between "genetically disadvantaged" and "deserves to feel bad about yourself", and people dont just aim that kind of judgement internally. I think the people who are comforted by those posts are probably reacting to the fact that they *have* been insulted as "inferior", by people who are using it to mean both "genetically disadvantaged" and "deserves to be shamed and laughed at"
In the Simpson's episode "Lisa's Rival", Lisa meets a girl her age named Allison who is better than her along every axis that Lisa cares about, superior in every activity and trait that Lisa has made her identity. And arguably Allison IS a "strictly-better Lisa"... except that Lisa, by virtue of suddenly being #2, is able to experience introspection, self-doubt, and worry. She has an identity crisis, tries on some other identities for size, rejects them, grapples with whether to cheat her way back to #1, and after this personal journey she decides she can live with Allison being better at her than everything.
(Although this is the less important part of my point, I'll note that she learns to accept it because 1) both her and Allison lose a contest to an inferior entrant on totally arbitrary irrational grounds, showing that being "better" doesn't determine your life outcome, and 2) she can bond with Allison through shared interests and shared superiority to the many people who are worse than her; and either realization probably works although kids tend towards the 2nd option.)
But in a meaningful way, being worse at everything than another person actually made Lisa a better person, because she knows what it's like to deal with these insecurities, and Allison never really has to. And as Scott points out, only one person can actually be #1, and so Allison is going to get to Vassar or Wellesley someday and have the same experience, but be less able to cope with it. It is also likely that by learning some humility, there are a lot of people over the course of their lives that will prefer Lisa's values and the way she treats people over Allison, and there are things Lisa could get from others that Allison couldn't. And this would hold true even if Allison were also better in the aggregate at promoting the same charities and social causes Lisa cares about.
Some people are actually inferior to others. One simply can choose not to oppress or murder people about it. It is possible to be an elitist about moral value, without killing people about it.
The reason the Twitter account exists is very simple. People who are actually inferior to others in most ways would rather seek reassurance than try to improve themselves. The Twitter account provides the reassurance. The ambiguity of the word "inferior" precisely serves this demographic by letting them seek reassurance about the practical meaning (skills) and justify their reassurance with its abstract meaning (fundamental humanity).
I feel like I comment this under every embryo selection post, but not being a Nazi involves more than just dodging verbal traps. The map is not the territory, and your object-level opponents are not sneaky journalists writing hitpieces!
Hitler himself said, "You must exist alongside the stupidest possible version of your ideology." What is the most bad-faith, black-and-white interpretation of your stance on embryo selection? THAT'S what people are responding to, because that's the attractor state for any policy that gets made. Law has no room for nuance.
Re: the second point about being "inferior" to other people, I mean the obvious thought is the idea that people/things can be of value in themselves as opposed to their instrumental value that they provide to society/other people, that the inherent value exists without being quantifiable or even on the same scale.
Let me give you an example to try to make this feel more intuitive. Does a mountain, pick one at random, have value? There is a sense in which it makes sense to say that it does. Does the sunset have value? There is a sense in which it makes sense to say that it does. Is the mountain more valuable than the sunset? This feels like a kind of nonsense question to me, even if you acknowledge that both the mountain and the sunset each have value. There is a sense that things having "value" without it being some sort of computable quantity that you can put on a single universal scale. Things can have different sorts of value (each their own kind of value), they can have inherent value that is not instrumental to the good they do for other purposes (in fact, what sort of value could otherwise exist? eventually the buck has to stop somewhere), value doesn't add up to single utility quantity (why should it? aside from the analogy to money--but ways of looking at the world without universal currency are certainly conceivable e.g. barter economy), etc. These are among my problems with utilitarianism.
The utilitarians would respond something like, "Sure, mountain A has value, because it generates person 1 0.5 units of joy, and person 2 mines some minerals from it that gives them 0.25 units of utility" etc. and the same for the sunset, and then they would say there is a definite answer to which gives more utility after doing the math to add them up or apply whatever function, but this just feels quite unsatisfying and silly to me. It seems easier to just say that things have value, just because they do.
IMO, one of the most important function of our higher consciousness, art, philosophy, and everything else, is finding ways to answer the question "Why should I not beat you to death with a rock?" with a NO!
This is why it is important that nobody is inferior to anybody at all ever. If it is possible genuinely rank people; it becomes impossible to answer "Why should I not beat you to death with a rock?" with a no.
The people lower on the ranking not only can but should beat to death with a rock everyone above them; the people high have morall license to beat to death everyone below them. For examples, see all of human history before universalism; a vast collection of various groups who truly believe in the possibility of inferiority, and also felt no compunctions about eg. condemning 200000 french peasants to death out of convenience or ripping each other limb from limb in the street.
So, to answer the question, " are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people?" NO, or I'm gonna start finding a nice heavy rock.
We may be missing some existentialism here. Superior is as superior does. However, since there are many things that superior can do, the key question is: superior for what purpose?
In a totalitarian system, your purpose is assigned to you. When people's lives are defined by their assigned purpose, it's easy to compare how well two people with the same purpose fulfill that purpose, and treat them accordingly. Different purposes may already have a prescribed hierarchical relationship, allowing us to compare apples and oranges when it comes to social calculations.
However, since we thankfully choose not to live in a totalitarian system, we must consider not only how much people contribute to society, but also what trust we want to maintain regarding how people are treated. The way society treats the less fortunate significantly influences how much the less fortunate can trust the rest of society, and vice versa. We need to reconcile the incentives for people to improve with the question of how we want the society we live in to treat the least well off. (My main ethical influences are precedent utilitarianism, and the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance.)
I do think that society should ideally try to cultivate more capable people over time, but the ways in which it does that must build up people's trust rather than damaging that trust by overstepping its range. Humans have already damaged that trust by mistreating those they deemed inferior, and bizarrely enough by deeming people inferior just because they were part of a cultural outgroup that became a scapegoat. The way we treat the less useful decides how afraid people are of the very idea of comparing people's utility in the first place.
If we want to build trust, we might start by committing not to use a person's relative lack of utility as an excuse to sacrifice them to save someone more useful. If in times of desperation we must decide who lives and dies at random rather than by calculated benefit to society, that will incentivize us to take proactive steps to prevent times of desperation. Otherwise, we might be tempted to allow a crisis to happen, which might make society on average stronger on the individual level but with much weaker trust. There would always be someone next in line to be sacrificed to bear the cost of society's malfeasance, and everyone would know whether they would be the ones to face those consequences or not. That does not sound to me like a society that would make good decisions.
To respond to the initial question about embryo selection in the simplified case of cystic fibrosis, I think that given the opportunity to avoid bringing a person into existence whose body would likely frustrate their ambitions significantly more than the average person's body does already and cause them likewise more pain and suffering, it is ethical to take that opportunity. The cost/benefit to society is probably worth considering as well, but if we make a habit of that we start shifting towards totalitarianism. There's no point in a society if its individuals aren't enjoying themselves, so creating individuals who can enjoy themselves can be worthy in itself.
I think Scott is very concerned about sounding like a Nazi, but I think he should worry about being Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was an extraordinary guy: fought in some of the worst battles of the Civil War, Supreme Court Justice, terrific prose style, very progressive. And yet! He was very excited about (old school, obv) eugenics to the point he made his opinion in Buck v. Bell into an ad for eugenics.
Or Francis Galton. I'm sure Galton never anticipated, and would have been horrified by, what resulted in the "we have now classified this set of people as sub-human" Nazi camps, but the early Eugenics Movement was the pebble that started the avalanche rolling.
One thing they all agreed on from the start was that not alone were the obvious things like physical and mental illness undesirable and it would be better to have healthy babies without such traits, that got expanded out to "and of course obvious criminal elements", "and of course the very poorest of the poor on the bottom of the social ladder" (what is now called the underclass), "and of course non-whites from certain nations who are still primitives", "and of course those who don't get a sufficiently high social score to be permitted to marry and have children".
Galton was extremely well-meaning, as may be seen by these excerpts from the collected "Essays in Eugenics" of 1909, but even there we may see the difference between what one particular period in time considers "superior" traits and what our current period does, then how much more the likely difference between us and our grandchildren on what are "superior" or "desirable" traits? And if Popular Opinion is going to be the means by which Eugenics is accepted into the mainstream, we should beware of how it is formed and how it is swayed.
From the Preface:
"The power by which Eugenic reform must chiefly be effected, is that of Popular Opinion, which is amply strong enough for that purpose whenever it shall be roused. Public Opinion has done as much as this on many past occasions and in various countries, of which much evidence is given in the Essay on Restrictions in Marriage. It is now ordering our acts more intimately than we are apt to suspect, because the dictates of Public Opinion become so thoroughly assimilated that they seem to be original and individual to those who are guided by them. By comparing the current ideas at widely different epochs and under widely different civilizations we are able to ascertain what part of our convictions is really innate and permanent, and what part has been acquired and is transient.
It is above all things needful for the successful progress of Eugenics that its advocates should move discreetly and claim no more efficacy on its behalf than the future will confirm ; otherwise a re-action will be invited. A great deal of investigation is still needed to shew the limit of practical Eugenics, yet enough has been already determined to justify large efforts to instruct the public in an authoritative way, as to the results hitherto obtained by sound reasoning, applied to the undoubted facts of social experience."
From the essay “Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims”:
"Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage. The improvement of the inborn qualities, or stock, of some one human population, will alone be discussed here.
What is meant by improvement? What by the syllable Eu in Eugenics, whose English equivalent is good ? There is considerable difference between goodness in the several qualities and in that of the character as a whole. The character depends largely on the proportion between qualities whose balance may be much influenced by education. We must therefore leave morals as far as possible out of the discussion, not entangling ourselves with the almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad. Moreover, the goodness or badness of character is not absolute, but relative to the current form of civilisation.
…Though no agreement could be reached as to absolute morality, the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life. In short that it was better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be. So with men. There are a vast number of conflicting ideals of alternative characters, of incompatible civilisations ; but all are wanted to give fulness and interest to life. Society would be very dull if every man resembled the highly estimable Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede. The aim of Eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens ; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilisation in their own way.
A considerable list of qualities can be easily compiled that nearly every one except “cranks” would take into account when picking out the best specimens of his class. It would include health, energy, ability,manliness and courteous disposition. Recollect that the natural differences between dogs are highly marked in all these respects, and that men are quite as variable by nature as other animals in their respective species. Special aptitudes would be assessed highly by those who possessed them, as the artistic faculties by artists, fearlessness of inquiry and veracity by scientists, religious absorption by mystics, and so on. There would be self-sacrificers, self-tormentors and other exceptional idealists, but the representatives of these would be better members of a community than the body of their electors. They would have more of those qualities that are needed in a State, more vigour, more ability, and more consistency of purpose. The community might be trusted to refuse representatives of criminals, and of others whom it rates as undesirable.
…Persistence in setting forth the national importance of Eugenics.
There are three stages to be passed through. Firstly it must be made familiar as an academic question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as a fact; Secondly it must be recognised as a subject whose practical development deserves serious consideration ; and Thirdly it must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction; just as it is his duty to succour neighbours who suffer misfortune. The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt. We are ignorant of the ultimate destinies of humanity, but feel perfectly sure that it is as noble a work to raise its level in the sense already explained, as it would be disgraceful to abase it. I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out sedulously in the study. Over-zeal leading to hasty action would do harm, by holding out expectations of a near golden age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to be discredited. The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study. Then let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly foresee."
Yes, it's that "we may not wholly foresee" that is the kicker there!
This seems like the vastly least interesting argument against genetic embryo screening. I want to hear about inbreeding, zero-sum/tragedy of the commons dynamics (e.g. taller people are more attractive, but mostly when compared to other, less tall people, and if everyone is 2m50 and can barely walk it would be bad), the way we're letting the future of human genetics be decided by the requirements of current society which has a lot of faults (imagine burnout-resistance genes or just docility and work ethic, etc..), the idea that genes may work together in different combinations with positive effects in some and negative in others (e.g. genes that make some people schizophrenic also make some other people geniuses), the conflict of interest between what parents want for their kids and what the kids want for themselves...
To focus on "some people feel bad about this but their feelings are irrational anyway" is way too easy an out.
Being tall is only attractive up to a certain point; people taller than that end up looking weird because their proportions start to get "off". As such, I wouldn't expect human height to increase infinitely.
Moreover, you are assuming that beauty is relative, but I think it actually isn't; if everyone was a 5/5, everyone would just be a 5/5. That might seem weird, but... is it? Like, if you take a bunch of attractive people, and stick them together, the least attractive of them does not become ugly.
As for the other things:
I think we're going to have to forcibly disassemble or destroy all authoritarian societies in the next 200 years, which is going to reduce or eliminate a lot of these concerns, as what really optimizes you to work in our society is being smart and prosocial. "Docility/passiveness" is not a positive trait from an economic POV; you want workers who are actively seeking out better opportunities.
What you do want to get rid of is a genetic predisposition towards violence, but that appears to be negative anyway, because studies on such people shows negative life outcomes on average.
"Nobody can make you feel genetically inferior without your consent" - until the laws get re-written in line with social attitudes changing.
The idea that, well, it will just go on continuing to be that people get nicer and nicer and society gets more liberal and we don't need to worry about sorting out inferior and superior unless we're strictly talking about embryo selection to do away with what all agree are nasty things like cystic fibrosis - I don't believe that.
Don't make assumptions about "well all right-thinking people now accept this, so this is the way it will stay forever".
Up to my early adulthood, we used to have Corpus Christi processions in town. Once upon a time, they processed all through the streets and ended up in the main square and there were Army guards and the like.
Gradually that dwindled away until now the 'procession' is held within the church on the day.
Instead, this week in the local park, we're going to have the Pride Festival for the third year. That is now the kind of new, major, public celebration for all to engage in and all accept the philosophical underpinnings of the beliefs.
Date of Corpus Christi - usually but not always in June as it is a moveable feast
Date of Pride Festival - 15th June this year
Attitudes change. Fixed beliefs change. You can't forecast that twenty or fifty years down the line, people won't accept that "genetically inferior" means "morally inferior as well". That's why I'm digging my heels in and making such a fuss over the likes of "really unsatisfying claims about legal systems" and "utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense", because if we just leave it up to Common Sense and Science-Based, we *will* end up with 'Lance *is* superior to you, so not alone would any reasonable person give him the parachute, they would not blame him for pushing you out of the plane without one'.
Start giving in on the "well this isn't really based on anything more than vague sentiment" and you'll find yourself free-falling through the clouds as you plummet to earth without a parachute, and all the "this was never intended to be the outcome!" in the world won't save you.
People generally don't claim you're morally inferior because you got cancer. It just sucks.
It's the same thing with genetics. You can't choose what genetics you have. Got cystic fibrosis? Sucks to be you.
Having better genes is pure upside, just like how being beautiful and smart is. Because those things are caused by genes. In fact, a lot of good things are caused by genes.
Having more good things is good.
Having fewer good things is bad.
This is not a moral judgement on the person. It's an evaluation of things.
Depends on your cancer; lung cancer because you were a heavy smoker? Your own fault, and people like that should be let die instead of clogging up the health system and taking resources from those who really need them.
Type 2 diabetes? Obviously you got that from being fat and lazy.
Plenty of examples where there is moral judgement for health conditions.
Part of it, I think, is a defence mechanism - if Bill got cancer out of the blue, then that means it could happen to me, too, for no reason! But if Bill got cancer because he smoked/drank/ate junk food, then that's okay - it's Bill's fault, he made bad choices because he's worse than me, *I* don't drink/smoke/eat junk food so *I* won't get sick, because I'm a good and upright person who has self-control and isn't a fat, lazy, blob.
If you get in a bunch of car accidents, you have to pay more for insurance than people who don't get in a bunch of car accidents.
That's how insurance works. If you are deliberately doing things that put you in a higher risk category, you *should* be paying more.
When you DON'T do that, it creates problems.
When you have a publicly subsidized system, then you create moral hazards for people, because you have people who are doing things that put them at much higher risk, and yet, their problems are being subsidized by everyone else. That IS an issue, and it's not unfair for people to feel put upon or burdened when people make choices that cause problems and then expect other people to fix them.
This is why we ban drugs. Drugs cause a lot of problems for everyone else in society and put burdens on them, because drug addicts can't take care of themselves in many cases. This means people who want to use recreational drugs responsibly get upset because they aren't allowed to use Drug X, but at the same time, other people are like "Drug X causes way more people to get cancer and to beat their wives and commit crimes and get in car crashes".
The other solution is to tax the hell out of them so they have to pay for the burdens they create. But there's limits on that and then people get upset when the people who violate the law and sell untaxed drugs illegally get in trouble, even though they absolutely deserve to get in trouble for it.
You (and other readers) may be interested interested in the concept of a “linguistic intervention”, which describes this sort of case where we say things like “people with disabilities are just like everyone else” or, in your case, “having a genetic disease doesn’t make you inferior”, as a form of conceptual activism that is used to promote a social goal (such as increasing respect and empathy for people with these disabilities/diseases).
Also known as language policing, one of my least favorite aspect of Woke. I like this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2g2oE0Q6fc It describes language policing at the University of Waterloo.
Ah, sorry, here’s a link to an open paper which actually describes linguistic interventions and their importance and the reasoning behind them: https://philarchive.org/rec/STELIA-6
I think you’re partially right: I believe that language policing is a type of linguistic intervention, but linguistic interventions are not equivalent to language policing.
Linguistic interventions are a *larger category* that describe when people try to introduce new words, change the meaning of existing words, or change the words in circulation.
Language policing is a type of linguistic intervention that attempts to change the words in circulation.
I watched your video (thank you for sharing it!), but I was confused by a few things:
1. The level of punishment that the university actually issues to student who use the unrecommended words. The YouTuber seemed to be hyping up the consequences, but I didn’t see any references to real discipline brought about by students using the unrecommended words
2. Whether the university is punishing students solely because of the use of those words (language policing), or because of the meaning and emotional impact of those words (closer to something like “social” policing, where if someone says something that causes stress among many (e.g. a threat or a slur), it is reasonable to punish that action in order to discourage it)
3. In what scenarios would the unrecommended words carry the meaning that the writer actually wants to convey? I didn’t watch the entire video, but most of the word changes didn’t seem like they would really change the meaning of what the writer wanted to say, unless the writer explicitly *wanted* to use a term with a far more negative connotation/background.
Here are some of my more general thoughts:
I generally think it’s very reasonable for a college to create a policy along the lines of: “Swear words in papers are generally not appropriate because they have an often unwanted impact on readers. Here is a list of swear words and words you might want to replace your swear words with. If you use swear words in a paper, please be warned that your grader may find this inappropriate and may penalize you accordingly.”
I see a similar thing going on here, where the non-recommended words carry weight and impact that students may not be aware of, and students using those words may not realize that they come off as racist, etc.
Thus, having the list makes it clear to students what words they might want to avoid.
What the list is missing, however, is the reasoning *behind* why one might want to avoid using those words. I think adding that might help better inform students.
All that said, I do understand the risks of language policing, and I hope that the university does too; thus, I hope that the university is merely providing guidelines and awareness, rather than imposing a rule and explicitly restricting speech. It wasn’t clear from the video if that is in fact the case or if the YouTuber (who does not attend that university and is distanced from Canadian culture) was overstating the situation and consequences.
I’d appreciate any thoughts you may have on linguistic interventions (especially the paper I linked which I have not read through fully), my confusions about the video, or my more general thoughts.
Many Thanks! Yes, I can get to Professor Sterken's paper. Yes, I agree that language policing is a subset of linguistic interventions. I _don't_ like the portion of the interventions such as Sterkin's
>Sometimes having certain word-meaning pairs in circulation in a population of speakers at a particular time, in a particular social-historical milieu, can be bad. Such word-meaning pairs might cause injustice or disadvantage, stifle discourse, deliberation and inquiry, or stall social progress. It’s not hard to think of examples – take any slur. The population would be better off without such word-meaning pairs.
Construing a term with a negative association as a slur, and penalizing its use, is a political act of censorship that I oppose. For instance (writing from the USA), "illegal immigrant" refers to someone who really _did_ violate the law in the process of immigrating, and I support the use of this term to acknowledge this fact.
I don't oppose factions coining new terms or phrases. As long as there is no coercion being applied, people can choose to use additional terms as they see fit.
I'm not thrilled to see new euphemisms, since they are used to conceal actions or conditions or identities that would, unconcealed, often prompt disapproval. I suspect that government and corporate PR departments are probably as bad or worse than political factions in this regard.
I'm ambivalent about factions modifying the meaning of existing terms. The left has generalized "racist" so broadly that the term effectively just mean "human" at this point. This leaves everyone in a quandry about what to call e.g. white or black supremacists.
( As an aside, I find it somewhat funny to see certain types of attempted coinings fail. There have been several attempts to coin neutral terms for someone stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot, for instance, was originally intended as a neutral technical term. It became a term of derision. I'll hazard a prediction that _any_ analogous future term will fare similarly. )
( As a second aside, Sterken's pervasive use of "ameliorator" to mean a person who is trying to change the language drives me up the wall. Frankly, I doubt that even _she_ actually intends the positive connotations of that term to apply to all of the examples that she gave. A more neutral term, e.g. "modifier", would not have grated on my nerves as much. )
>Interventionists even risk detrimentally undermining the functioning of the language system, or they may end up silencing themselves
Yup! If members of a faction modify the meanings of the terms they use far enough from the ordinary meanings, a common reaction from people outside their faction to their speech may become "I have no idea what you are talking about." . Less drastically, in technical contexts, jargon and "terms of art" are often used with special meanings, e.g. "group", "field", "residue", and "pole" in mathematics. In those contexts, writers or speakers generally make it glaringly obvious that they intend to use the specialized meaning, not the ordinary meaning.
Personally, I regard "undermining the functioning of the language system" as a hostile act, damaging a commons that we all depend on.
>I watched your video (thank you for sharing it!), but I was confused by a few things: 1. The level of punishment that the university actually issues to student who use the unrecommended words. The YouTuber seemed to be hyping up the consequences, but I didn’t see any references to real discipline brought about by students using the unrecommended words
Many Thanks! Yes, I am also uncertain what level of punishment the university actually imposes on students using the terms it doesn't like.
>but most of the word changes didn’t seem like they would really change the meaning of what the writer wanted to say
One of the most glaring examples of a forced change is at 6:40 in the video, the change from "minority" to "equity deserving groups". That changes the meaning from a neutral statistical fact, that some group is less than 50% of the population, to a compelled, _very_ political, policy endorsement.
>Construing a term with a negative association as a slur, and penalizing its use, is a political act of censorship that I oppose. For instance (writing from the USA), "illegal immigrant" refers to someone who really _did_ violate the law in the process of immigrating, and I support the use of this term to acknowledge this fact.
I agree with you that a term should not be given a negative connotation and be penalized for its usage out of thin air. However, I think the extent to which this happens is exceedingly rare.
I think one thing we might disagree about is who has the right to say that a word is harmful and penalize its usage. I imagine in many of these cases, people have experienced discrimination in association with these words, and so the words have taken on meaning beyond their literal interpretation. For example, calling someone an "illegal immigrant" likely also carries baggage of questioning their belonging and a hidden threat of deportation, in a way that saying "this person who entered the country without following our customs, but is an integral part of our community" does not. The term "illegal immigrant" carries with it a sort of stigma and threat that other wording likely would not. If you want to explicitly specify that they entered illegally, you could replace "without following our customs" with "illegally", and it would still come off differently and make people feel more comfortable.
Now, if your goal is to insinuate that illegal immigrants in the community you're speaking to don't belong and should be deported, then I think your use of the term is likely warranted. However, that's a really scary threat to insinuate, especially on a campus where some of the students or their families may have entered the country illegally. So I think it makes sense for a university to say that that language should likely not be used.
In short, I think I likely disagree with you about the amount of coercion being applied when stating that a word is harmful.
My guess is that our core disagreement here is that we differ on the populations that are allowed to make a word be considered "harmful". I could be wrong, but my hunch is that you believe that in order for a word to be considered harmful, it should be *generally* considered to be harmful. I tend to believe that in order for a word to be considered harmful, only the population harmed by that word (in an environment where they are comfortable to speak their real thoughts) needs to say that it's harmful. To put this dichotomy into practice, my hunch is that you believe something along the lines of: because "illegal immigrant" doesn't *generally* seem to carry all that much stigma or be that hurtful, universities should not warn about usage of that term. Whereas my stance is closer to: illegal immigrants, when talking amongst themselves, agree that when people use the term "illegal immigrant", it's usually emotionally harmful; therefore, in an environment that may include illegal immigrants, it makes sense to warn people and penalize them for using language that is particularly stigmatizing and harmful for people in the community. My guess is that you likely view my case as being a form of "coercion" because that stigma isn't generally agreed upon.
Is that kind of the root of our disagreement, or am I jumping to incorrect conclusions?
What I think we both agree on is that people should be able to say these words without large governmental organizations (country/state-level) penalizing it. (Am I right that we agree there?)
Where I think we might differ is in the freedom of smaller communities to penalize certain language use, how strong those penalties should be, and (as described above) how communities should decide what language to penalize.
>I'm ambivalent about factions modifying the meaning of existing terms. The left has generalized "racist" so broadly that the term effectively just mean "human" at this point. This leaves everyone in a quandry about what to call e.g. white or black supremacists.
I'm going to purposely skip over some smaller points like this that I don't think will be helpful for us to discuss in detail, but if you think that this is a critical discussion, I'm open to hearing arguments as to why.
>( As a second aside, Sterken's pervasive use of "ameliorator" to mean a person who is trying to change the language drives me up the wall. Frankly, I doubt that even _she_ actually intends the positive connotations of that term to apply to all of the examples that she gave. A more neutral term, e.g. "modifier", would not have grated on my nerves as much. )
Agreed; I think she's doing a bit of her own linguistic intervention here to give this a bit more of a positive social justice spin that detracts from the clarity of the philosophy.
>Personally, I regard "undermining the functioning of the language system" as a hostile act, damaging a commons that we all depend on.
Reading a bit more of the paper, I think Sterken would likely agree with you. She herself calls the specific type of linguistic interventions she's discussing "linguistic transgression[s]" (pg 8). However, she then goes on to point out that these transgressions may be justified by the benefits they bring to the linguistic community.
I think this is similar (though clearly not what she's talking about - penalizing term usage is not the sort of linguistic transgression she's talking about in that section) to how I laid out above that penalizing the use of the term "illegal immigrants" might create a better environment for members of a linguistic community who entered (or had family who entered) the country illegally.
In short, I think you're right that these actions are hostile to the existing communication, and may cause confusion and miscommunication. But I also think they also may have long-term benefits to members of the linguistic community that may justify causing that initial confusion and miscommunication.
>One of the most glaring examples of a forced change is at 6:40 in the video, the change from "minority" to "equity deserving groups". That changes the meaning from a neutral statistical fact, that some group is less than 50% of the population, to a compelled, _very_ political, policy endorsement.
I agree, that's a huge shift in meaning and they should probably see if there's a better replacement term that doesn't carry the same implications as "equity deserving groups" does. I think the meaning there has shifted far too much for it to be a reasonable drop-in replacement.
Have I seemed to identify our main points of agreement and disagreement? Either way, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts. Thanks again for the detailed reply and discussion.
I think I struggle to accept that lance really is good at everything but even if he is I'm not sure that it makes sense to use the word inferior for the rest of us. People ascribe value to different things in life and not just to IQ or strength. It's going to depend on what you value and how others make you feel. Example: I'm in a serious relationship and you show me a woman with a higher iq and a a higher level of attractiveness than my partner. Would it make sense for me to call her superior? To me the answer is no, this new person doesn't make me feel the way my current partner does. Does this person know how to make me laugh? I think with things like the medical condition described in the post it's a bit easier to agree on screening that out. What is harder is things like personality or being wierd or a little on the spectrum. Selecting a world of lances would make for a much worse blogging and twitter experience.
That utterly undefinable spiritual equality thing is not actually that hard to state for a Buddhist:
Both your and Lance's suffering deserves equal compassion, in measure to the amount of suffering, regardless of whose body that suffering is in. That is it. That is the sense (and the only fundamental sense) in which you are equal.
Sure, an impartial judge might save Lance in the plane situation. That is fine and correct. Presumably your wife would save you, and Lance's partner would save Lance. That is also fine and correct. We are not impartial judges, and we should not be impartial judges in situations where we are not impartial. Besides, these all have nothing to do with the fact that you both get equal compassion for all the hardships you go through in life.
The concept of 'superiority' itself is a flawed and dangerous one because it assumes that value is one dimensional. The mistake of the Nazis was not that they made distinctions in quality at all; it was that they arrogantly assumed that they had already mapped all the dimensions of quality that matter, even while neglecting the importance of diversification to remain adaptive long term in a complex evolving environment. No finite system, no matter how intelligent, would ever be sane to believe it has already mapped all the dimensions of value that will matter for long term success. So it is a cultural virtue to practice humility in evaluating the value of one's allies. We can usefully make distinctions about the value we believe different people to have in some bounded context (including the entire present world economy, say - though distinctions in value at that scale would warrant very large error bars), but it will always be a mistake to jump to a state of total conviction about the relative value between any two agents in absolute terms.
Could we all perhaps try to admit that the ethical problem with NAZIs is not in them recognizing that some human trait X is less desirable in (almost) all circumstances than trait Y but in them going "Let's kill all people with X! Muahahaha!"?
As long as we do not manage to admit that we will keep tieing ourselves into epistemic knots to maintain doublethink in any place the above proposition is even partially true, which IMHO is really undignified for a movement who's core value is to unflinchingly look at the truth.
You are correct, but the Nazi problem is that it demonstrates that it is indeed entirely possible for some set of people to go from "We all agree that human trait X is less desirable" to "Let's kill all people with X!"
That's the Lebensunwertes Leben Problem, and we don't have any sure-fire way of making sure it won't happen again, since it did happen not just in Nazi Germany (the infamous Carrie Buck case with Oliver Wendell Holmes for one instance). It's very, very easy, unpleasantly so, for humans to go "if X is a bad thing, then having X is a bad thing, then we should get rid of X, then people who have X are bad, then we should get rid of those people". We already are too prone to talk about "IQ 90 normies" and "productive, creative people who grow the economy" and the rest of it.
"The poster says: "This person who suffers a hereditary disease has a lifelong cost of 60,000 Reichsmarks to the National Community. Fellow German, that is your money as well."
Again, see abortion rates of Down's Syndrome foetuses.
And it starts with language like this, where the pro-amendment slant of the piece (on the Irish campaign as to whether or not to amend our Constitution to permit limited abortion) does - "it's not a baby, it's a foetus":
"The NDSCR annual report does not use the word “babies” or “baby“, but refers to “prenatal diagnosis” and uses the words “pregnancies” and “fetal”.
The use of the word ‘baby’ is significant as there is currently a case before the Supreme Court on the meaning of the word ‘unborn’ in the Constitution.
A ruling by the High Court in 2016 found that references to the “unborn” in the Constitution meant an unborn child. Now the Supreme Court is to examine the ruling, in which judge Richard Humphreys ruled that the use of the word “unborn” in Bunreacht na hÉireann meant an “unborn child”, with the unborn’s rights extending beyond the right to life.
While the Supreme Court wrestles with this, currently the word ‘baby’ is typically used to refer to a child that has been born. Under dictionary definitions, ‘baby’ refers to an ‘extremely young child’.
In essence, while the poster uses the word ‘baby’, what it really means is ‘unborn child’ or ‘foetus’."
You see? 'This entity with the undesirable trait is not quite human, or not yet at least, and not really fully human the way normal people like you and I are'. And so if we do away with these less-humans, then it's not murder, it's just... being compassionate. Or eugenics for the good of society as a whole. Or ending a life that will only be one of misery and pain.
"Let's kill all people with X because they're not really people!" is the sugar-coated pill that we are persuaded to swallow, as per that news article:
"The statement on the billboard poster is:
In Britain, 90% of babies with Down Syndrome are aborted.
On a basic level, the statement does not clarify that the 90% rate refers to prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome.
In order to be fully correct, the poster could say:
In England and Wales, 90% of pregnancies with prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome are terminated.
The statistic of 90% is correct when referring to prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome.
However, this is not a clarification available to members of the public passing by these billboards."
The inverse of the Nazi problem is the Commie problem, and given that disparities in life outcomes exist and are currently seen as undesirable, you either acknowledge the reality of genetic impacts on those outcomes (Nazi-leaning) or you don't (Commie-leaning.) Genocide is bad, (I say, cueing applause,) but eradicating the fit is still worse than eradicating the unfit, so... if you have to chose language that could be twisted into justifying one versus justifying the other, I think you need to err in favour of preventing the former.
Also, the commie-preventing statement happens to be true. I think that counts for something.
"Again, see abortion rates of Down's Syndrome foetuses" - Out of curiosity, do you object to abortion in general, or would you cease objecting if the foetus in question was entirely healthy and neurotypical?
I am surprised Scott missed and answer I think his obvious : He is equal to Lance in terms of moral consideration of his interest.
His interest (as the interest of any other humans or animals) should have the same weight.
It doesn't mean we should not prefer to save Lance, just that we should save Lance because we are also weighing the interest of the other persons he will help.
Also, this is also what is bad about saying someone is genetically inferior, because it could mean "his interests are inferiors, we should weight them less", and it is exactly what racist do.
The point of establishing generically superior or inferior people is for the superior to rule over the inferior. They use science and metrics because there is this idea of science of impartial objective judge; this way there can be no doubt, as Science is as close to god or priests as anything in a functionally atheistic world.
it's just a version of "i have divine/royal blood and so i am fit to rule" dressed up in the modern lingo. For all their intellect, people make the same errors and just dress it up in new language.
Premise (1): Genetics can cause people to differ in intelligence, happiness, success, contribution to society, etc. in predictable and (in principle) modifiable ways.
Premise (2): There's no useful way to frame the question "am I inferior?" such that less intelligent, less happy, less successful, less socially useful people can honestly answer "no".
Progressives generally deny premise (1). Traditionalists generally deny premise (2). You deny... neither? And you think that's... okay?
I wanted to believe you had some other way out of the conclusion. But this post convinces me you don't. You embrace it. You come right out and say that your life should be weighted less than Lance's in the ethical balance, even to the point of choosing which one of you should die. You just DON'T THINK THAT'S BAD. And then you act offended when other people say it's really bad, and try to hold you to the implications of your own worldview!
Look, I despise a lot of the flak the rationalist / EA community gets from progressives. The intellectual injustice of those criticisms viscerally offends and upsets me. But if you accept (1) AND (2) then you deserve all the opprobrium they're throwing at you and then some. You're trying to take a morally monstrous position and spin it as "yeah, but the nice medicalized version of that, not the thing you all want to cancel." This IS what they want to cancel! And for good reason!
You've expressed sympathy for "positive eugenics" in the past, and disappointment that it got associated with Nazi-style eugenics. THIS IS WHY THEY'RE ASSOCIATED! In a utilitarian framework nothing but situational pragmatic considerations lets you distinguish the two! The world is not about to let you get away with obfuscating this because you don't like the PR. And rightly so!
Anyway, this is the post I'll be linking all my normie friends to when I need a quick demonstration of why we need deontology.
I do not understand this post. If you have no good argument / explanation for why you are not inferior (and a prima facie good one for why you might be) then you should accept that you probably are. The arguments offered here seem to amount to 'I don't want to be cancelled' and 'it would make me feel sad'. These are not good reasons for believing something (e.g. apply them to something like believing in god).
This seems especially weird when there are (I think) better arguments that would address a concern over 'genetic inferiority' that are not offered: genetic superiority / inferiority is not very important given everything else that makes you up; measurement is arbitrary (is it from your genes' perspective, society, which society?); other people's good fortune does not make you worse off.
Scott, your distinction between “being worse” versus “being inferior” works with regard to some ethical questions related to the life situation of people with cystic fibrosis (and people like Lance), but not with regard to other, perhaps more pressing, ethical questions.
To specify the problem, the actors, and the means available to them:
(1) Is the perceived problem to make people with cystic fibrosis (or being less attractive than good-looking Lance), to stop feeding their inner I-am-worthless demon?
(2) And are you (qua a psychiatrist) the actor paid by someone to help achieve this?
…(3) Then, sure, choosing words aimed at telling the patient that he/she/they are not inferior to anybody else (although they may be “worse” among several or all dimensions), seems like a fruitful cognitive-type strategy to achieve this aim.
This is the (1) problem, (2) the actor, and (3) the choice of strategy where the different ways to word the problem - not as “being inferior”, but rather as “being worse but not inferior” - is a relevant distinction to emphasize. As you write: “The problem with claiming that Lance is superior to me isn’t that he isn’t. It’s that it indicates I’m asking the wrong question to try to trick myself into being miserable..... the correct answer to “am I inferior to Lance?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you make me depressed.””
…But there are other problems & other actors & other types of means related to cystic fibrosis, and to Lance. Where the ethical questions related to (1) what is the problem, (2) who are the actors/decision-makers, and (3) what are fruitful interventions, are unrelated to the “being worse” versus “being inferior” distinction.
Let me illustrate, first related to people with cystic fibrosis:
1. Should parents have the right to abort fetuses with cystic fibrosis? That is, should parents be the ones who have the right to decide if a fetus with cystic fibrosis is born or not? Notice that their decision is not dependent on whether they think a person with cystic fibrosis is “inferior” to others; it is enough if they regard him/her as likely to have a sufficiently bad life, including making life sufficiently worse for parents, that it tips the balance in the fetus’ disfavor.
If we are in a country where abortion is legal, we need further specifications of “what is the problem, who is to decide, and what means can they use”:
1a. Should it be legal for parents to take the tests that can determine if a fetus has cystic fibrosis (or other genetic disorders)?
1b. (stronger) Should governments subsidize the test?
…From cystic fibrosis, we can move on to your other examples: Schizophrenia and low IQ. And further to Trisomy 21. And so on.
Second, regarding good-looking Lance versus the rest of us:
2. If the question is if Lance, you, me, or any other ACX reader should get the single parachute, I am on your side: Let’s give it to Lance. Because we need more good-looking men with insufferably high self-confidence. We are collectively the decision-makers, and as the plane goes down we agree that although Lance is not superior to us he is better than us, so please take our only parachute.
But what if the problem is something else, and where the decision-makers are someone else than us? For example, suppose none of us can get laid, because the Lances of the world are deemed more attractive by those who decide who gets laid, i.e. women? It is small comfort if women assure us that they do not regard us as inferior to Lance, only as worse than Lance. Since the outcome of their decision boils down to the same thing.
If we are in a country where women are allowed to decide who they sleep with, we have a similar list of more specified real-life problems, actors, and policy means, unrelated to whether the decision-makers regard others than Lance as “inferior” or merely as “worse”. Such as:
2a. Should people who cannot get laid (= are regarded as “inferior” or “worse” than Lance) at least have the right to Ersatz sex, i.e. should pornography be legal?
2b. Should people who cannot get laid also have access to paid sex? I.e. should prostitution be legal?
2c. Should the government actively help people who cannot get laid? In order to approach a situation where someone being regarded by decision-makers as either “inferior” or “worse” than Lance and his ilk, does not result in they totally missing the goods that the decision-makers otherwise dish out? For example, by letting government-paid social workers facilitate contact with prostitutes, or to show clients how to masturbate? (Practiced to some extent in Denmark related to people with severe disabilities, including severe cognitive impairments.)
…all of the above just to illustrate that many (most?) ethical questions concerning 1) what should be regarded as the problem, 2) who should be the decision-makers related to it, and 3) what means the decision-makers should be allowed to use to deal with it, are not resolved by making a distinction between what it means to say that someone is “worse” than someone else, versus what it means to say that someone is “inferior” to someone else.
But if we limit attention to therapeutic situations then, sure, maybe it helps one's ego to perceive oneself not as “inferior” but merely as “worse” than others....
In general, there are almost no rules which are valid across all possible aggregation functions. Conflict on these questions occurs when someone generalizes the rule until they find an aggregation function which violates it.
When specifying a rule, be as specific about the aggregation function as possible, and then build upwards, e.g. is Lance bigger? under the aggregation "bigger" is easily measured; then simply accumulate aggregation functions which satisfy the rules rather than start with the generic "better" and work downward.
The question "is group A better than group B "is toxic, but "is group A taller than group B" is not. There is a further set of conflict related to the definition of the rule, and this is the source of the problem with "smarter" or "better". The general public does not agree with the concept of a generic "smarter" or "better", so we get journalists that exploit this gap with questions like the ones you mention.
> Some people cannot think clearly through a problem if you use outdated or offensive language. Nobody is inferior to anyone else? So a person who kills children and saves the lives of children are morally equal?
Helen Dale wrote an essay about her moral outrage when, as a child, she heard her mother pragmatically remark that a mentally retarded child had less value than a useful dog. ( https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/peter-singer-and-the-romans )
> There’s a psychiatric phenomenon called “moral dumbfounding.” It manifests when you think something is evil or disgusting, and you want to say it’s immoral, but you can’t think of a reason why it’s immoral. So, you end up saying it just is. I was, I think, seven at the time my mother ranked a dog above a human being, but I recognise in the recollection of her comment my first experience of moral dumbfounding. How could a dog be worth more than a child, even a stupid one who sat, dough-like, at his desk day-after-day, unable to write his name?
The whole thing seems totally incoherent; assuming that a useless vegetable is more valuable than a useful animal because the vegetable is human and the animal isn't immediately implies that a murderer is more valuable than a useful animal for the same reason. And that implies that imprisoning murderers is something you shouldn't do. We imprison them 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 they have negative value; we have guide dogs because they have positive value. It's not at all difficult to draw the comparison.
A large part of the problem with the pragmatic remarks is that the people who make them tend not to be very nice people, and tend to treat other people as inferior to themselves, never mind if the other person is retarded or not.
So the kind of person (and it may not be Ms. Dale's mother in practice) who makes remarks like "a good sheep dog is better than that downie" is not alone more likely to mistreat the retard, they're more likely to mistreat all others around them since the most valuable person in the entire world is they themselves.
That's what gets the eugenicists and the pragmatists a bad name.
> So the kind of person (and it may not be Ms. Dale's mother in practice) who makes remarks like "a good sheep dog is better than that downie" is not alone more likely to mistreat the retard, they're more likely to mistreat all others around them since the most valuable person in the entire world is they themselves.
This is a real issue. But it's not fundamental to the question at hand, or to any of the other questions where it comes up.
I've seen a literary villain characterized by saying that as a boy he enjoyed pulling the wings off of flies. (I think this was in The 13 Clocks, but I can't guarantee that.) It's easy to draw analogies to more undesirable tastes and behaviors, but I will argue that this really shouldn't be done.
One thing that I, personally, did as a boy was incinerate ants with a magnifying glass. This seems fairly well equivalent to pulling the wings off of flies; I'm devoting special effort to killing them in a particularly painful fashion.
Of course the big difference is that my activity was a popular pastime actively suggested by local culture, which means there was no inference to draw about my personality.
And everyone endorses 𝘴𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 flies. The only problem with a boy doing that is that it dirties his hands while making the world better for everyone else.
The only reason that the stigmatized behavior is informative as to undesirable personality traits is specifically that the behavior is stigmatized. You can say the same thing about wearing sneakers instead of dress shoes, or wearing a bikini instead of a burka, and people do. But it's very rare for Westerners to argue that it's 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 to stigmatize those behaviors!
> So the kind of person (and it may not be Ms. Dale's mother in practice) who makes remarks like "a good sheep dog is better than that downie" is not alone more likely to mistreat the retard, they're more likely to mistreat all others around them
I don't think this can explain Helen Dale's reaction, since she would have been familiar with her own mother and the remark seems totally justified. (If you read the essay, Dale's mother makes it after the retarded child's father kills the dog.)
> And everyone endorses 𝘴𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 flies.
Not the Buddhists. I'm not really one anymore but I've kept the habit of not actively killing bugs.
Poor phrasing; swatting flies contradicts Buddhist doctrine, but the vast majority of Buddhists don't care. They endorse swatting flies just like everyone else.
I don't know about most Buddhist b/c that's a vast field, but the Tibetan Buddhist communities I've known (in the EU) all seemed to push the point enough to count as not endorsing killing insects, and I remember most of the people avoiding it most of the time, and being apologetic when they resorted to it. I've also personally seen this kind of respect for life in the East, among Nepalis especially. Not that everyone would refrain, but there was a level of shared acknowledgment that they should.
Having read the essay, I have no problem with classifying Mrs. Dale as a stupid bitch who would, if given the ability, have no problem drawing up little lists of who should and should not be sent off to the camps.
It was ordinary normal Germans who did what we are all tip-toeing around by calling "Nazi eugenics". The Mrs. Dales of the world, with their charitable activities, would have been very happy to go along with "isn't it time to put this generation out of their misery?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_euthanasia_in_Nazi_Germany
A dog is not worth more than a human, no matter how valuable the dog or how retarded the human. If it had been the father of a 'normal' child who killed the dog by accident, would she have made the same remark? And yet the end result would have been the same: a valuable working dog killed by a careless driver. The fact that this particular remark leapt to her lips so readily demonstrates what she really thought of the genetically inferior, and it wasn't Scott's kindly conclusion.
EDIT: Let me expand on this, to be clear. If Mrs. Dale had said "The dog was worth more than that damn fool" about the man hitting it with the car, then I'd have no objections. That's a normal thing to say.
But the child, so far as I can see, had nothing to do with the accident. They didn't kill the dog, and unless they were in the car and grabbed the steering wheel, they weren't responsible for it. So the fact that Mrs. Dale immediately invoked "the dog was more valuable than the child" means that mentally she had categorised that family as "the family with the retard" and clearly had slotted them into a place of lower worth - be that genetically inferior or less moral worth.
Imagine, as I said, this was the father of a normal child. What would you then think if Mrs. Dale made the remark about the value of the child versus the dog? Imagine a child had run out into the road - children do this - and the driver swerved to avoid hitting them, went up on the footpath, and killed the guide dog.
If Mrs. Dale said "the dog was more valuable than the child", wouldn't you wonder about her set of values? What would you think if she said yes, the driver should have chosen to hit the child and not the dog? If she explained that "Any kid stupid enough to run out into the road is only going to be a burden on society, it would have been better if the driver hit the idiot and took it out of the way before it could grow up and breed more fools", would you be pleased or appalled at such objective consideration of societal contribution?
“I cope with the awareness that I'm genetically/biologically inferior to many people by just reframing it as my playing life on hard mode, and so therefore instead of being shameful it becomes vaguely commendable for me to put up with my defectiveness.”
Neat. This is most modern version of the Stoic challenge where the gods throw obstacles in front of us to test our mettle and improve us.
I also resonate with your thinking about living as the mirror.
They still exist as unattached burdens
Every time I think that, it turns out I had just curated my normal environment to be free of them. :-(
In what situations would you blame someone for not being intelligent?
Lots of people seem like they want to be "tricked" into feeling depressed
I agree this is true but think it is worth resisting! See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/singing-the-blues
Scott begins that post with:
"Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music."
Does anyone else other than me have the opposite experience? When I'm sad, I like music that cheers me up.
When I'm sad, I listen to happy music to cheer up. When I'm happy, I listen to happy music because it's fun. I am a simple creature with simple tastes.
Same with me as with NormalAnomaly. I do not consume sad music, novels, films, or anything else that is depressing in some way — I like pleasure and happiness.
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(Strangely, the unrestricted — some might even say /excessive/ — pursuit of unalloyed euphoria and pleasure has brought me sadness more than once.
Maybe everyone was right when they said all that stuff. You know, about like... having cake and eating it too, the value of hard work, the importance of loyalty and self-sacrifice, the dangers of heroin, blah blah blah all the other nonsense and etc.)
Can you recommend some happy novels?
Modern publishing seems obsessed with a narrow spectrum of fairly well-trodden and quite unhappy-making themes, and I'd love a change. I solemnly promise to read them responsibly and not seek unalloyed euphoria...
I found the novels in 'The Baroque Cycle' by Neal Stephenson to be reasonably happy, all things considered.
walkaway by Cory Doctorow is good. There is definitely struggle, but the overall theme is hope.
Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries. They’re murder mysteries, but the victims aren’t characters you know, and her detective and the world he lives in are delightful.
I have already read these! Yes, I agree they are delightful.
All of Jane Austen....incredibly sophisticated humor, wry tongue-in-cheek social commentary, very well developed characters (even many of the minor characters), happy endings, bad guys get some gentle form of comeuppance, engaging dialogue, and if you find a good reader (Librevox, a free book app and worth the pittance for an ad free version, has two great readers Karen Savage, and Elizabeth Klett) excellent audio books to listen to over and over.
Also, almost all of Anthony Trollope. I also like most of Gordon R. Dickson, and *of course* Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.
_The Goblin Emperor_ might count. It's set in a world where cooperation is rewarded.
On the strength of your recommendations for Austen and Pratchett (both of which I have read) I will seek out the others you suggest. Many thanks.
No! Screw responsibility! If *we* don't seek to sup the pure shining sea of pleasure dry — if WE do not wield the glorious Brand of Unmitigated Hedonism — /then who will?!/
To that end, oh boy, I have a /lot/ of recommendations. It would help to know how you felt about historical fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy, though; that's mostly what I read, in fiction. Also, male readers generally tend to enjoy my recommendations in the genre "military sci-fi", but no woman — as of yet — has ever managed to even finish one of the things, heh... :'(
A few women WRITE military sci-fi, so with a larger sample size (how large? dunno), surely you might get there...
That said, I'm a woman who reads sci-fi, and military is not my jam. I finished one, though.
For Rufienne, if they'd pick up SF/F, I'd personally recommend anything by Lois McMaster Bujold EXCEPT The Hallowed Hunt.
Have at it, then. :-)
I enjoy all of the above, with the (apparently predictable) exclusion of military SF (with the exception of Heinlein, which I did enjoy! - but that is going back a fair ways). However if the characterisation is strong enough, I would be willing to give even military SF a go; I'm just not that interested in theoretical military strategising though - or explosions for explosions' sake.
Fantasy is a mixed bag; a lot of modern fantasy is too swords and sorcerers for me, but fantasy novels that are purely fantastical are often excellent - Bridge of Birds comes to mind.
Robin McKinley has a lot of happy stuff, but also some bittersweet, but that doesn't sound like as much of a problem?
If you're in the mood for swashbuckling adventure in the spirit of Dumas, try "The Phoenix Guards" by Steven Brust. (The proper way to read it is giggling all the way through.)
I hate, hate, hate bittersweet. To me, it is purely bitter, and all the worse for it because it tricks you for a bit into thinking it's /actually/ sweet.
Great rec re: Brust, though.
P.G. Wodehouse?
If you're into fantasy, I'd say Pratchett has some really happy ones. "Going Postal", "Thud!" come to mind. (My favorite one, "Night Watch", is absolutely depressing, but I'd say that's untypical.) I highly recommend these books if you haven't read them - perhaps look up some quotes if you'd like to be convinced.
I agree. I have all of Pratchett's books and am considering (yet another) re-reading.
Since you clearly have excellent taste, do you have any other suggestions?
Since everyone's giving you SF and fantasy, I'll offer something else: Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum-Bun: A Novel without a Moral. It's a Harlem Renaissance novel with a happy ending.
I'll check it out - a change of genre is very welcome.
Edit - oh, written in 1928! Yep I will go find this, thank you.
The Golden Age of the Solar Clippers series by Nathan Lowell are a light, low-action (detractors complain of boredom) series about the protagonist working his way up through the ranks as a starship crew member, and making increasing amounts of money as he develops a nose for a good trade.
The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (and sequels) is about the protagonist, personal secretary to the emperor, developing a friendship with same as he institutes a series of government reforms.
Rachel Numeier's Tuyo series isn't all that happy—the villains put our protagonists through great trials—but they generally *end* happily, and she's written about how she likes her protagonists to be good-hearted people doing their best, which I feel characterizes the series well. (I also thought the prose was very nice).
Thanks for these suggestions.
I'll follow up on all of them; I don't think they would have come into my orbit otherwise, so I appreciate you pointing them out.
Goblin Emperor left me feeling very warm and happy.
I also like pleasure and happiness but I consume "sad" things because they often create a more interesting emotional state than "happy" things. Or at least how I think of it, "happy" is good but a bit like sugar - can be saccharine/cloying.
If I'm being very self-aware I would have to admit I'm usually doing this for essentially hedonistic motivations, makes me feel "deep", "more alive", but ultimately still just some kind of high I'm chasing
A lot of people say this, but to me it's like saying "I like eating garbage, because it has more complex flavor than 'good' food." Like... yeah, maybe, maybe not, but I still don't want it!
Sometimes I want to be sad, in a way that I'd endorse (i.e. at "reflective equilibrium"). Call it catharsis. For example, at funerals, I don't want to distract myself from the sadness the whole time, that defeats the purpose of a funeral. Or if I'm angry and I decide screaming into a pillow will help.
When it's not one of those situations, I try to do things that will cheer me up. That's obviously the right thing to do.
But then again, that's a strategy that I learned at a point in my life, and which I must remember and choose to apply. Sometimes it comes naturally, yes, but sometimes it's my abstract decision-making process overriding my natural instincts. Which implies that my natural instinct is to mope.
I mean, if you need happy music to make yourself stop being sad, doesn't that imply that your natural behavior would be to keep being sad? Why? Why not just, like, stop? Clearly you are in a stable equilibrium of sadness, and require an external stimulus to stop. Doesn't that imply that you too have a tendency to mope? You just are good at not letting your music choices be influenced by your moping tendency
There are external drivers and then there are internal drivers. If you listen to happy music, then when memories of music show up, they'll tend to be happy, and drive your emotions in that direction.
FWIW, funerals being solemn and sad is a cultural choice. In my particular subculture it is preferred that they be memories of happy experiences being recalled, including the happy emotions. I wouldn't insist on being happy at a solemn funeral, but that's not what I had for my wife. I may be sad she's no longer with me, but the memories of her are happy.
My father explicitly said "I don't want a funeral, I want a party," and that's what he got; all his friends got together again and drank and laughed and listened to loud music and had a good time.
My thinking is honestly that I'm pretty good at avoiding sadness, but it would just feel weird if my grandmother died and I never cried about it. A funeral seems like the right time to wallow in sorrow, just for a small part of it, so that in the future I can know that I did.
My memories of the person are mostly happy with a tinge of sadness, and the funeral is mostly happy with a tinge of sadness, but the sadness did get a chance to stand alone for a few minutes so I know for sure what's in there.
I prefer not to weep or feel sadness even at funerals and all. Like, I get your rationale; and I think most would agree with you, immediately or upon reflection — but...
Well, I have trained myself to have a sort of "flinch response" to thinking too closely about things, such as (e.g.): "remember that time you found your best friend's dead body and realized that he died waiting for you and this was possibly a cry for help that failed because you didn't come when you said you were going to?"
shit actually I'm getting too close to really thinking about it right now. just move fast enough you don't let yourself /feel/, and it's usually okay to even appear to be sadly discussing it IRL for a bit — sort of just let your thoughts skim off the surface of your brain, if you know what I mean; focus on your words as if entirely meaningless symbols elicited by the curious natives of this planet at their quaint "fyuu-nurgal" or whatever it's called —
— okay, we're good now. See, very doable; sure, many people say that someday I will have to "pay the piper" when I can no longer stop my thought-tongue from probing the mental "dry socket of loss" (where once the tooth of love had masticated away upon the donuts of happiness, or... something)...
...but that's the beauty of this trick: when you finally fail in your vigilance, or it just really hits you due to some chance event¹ or comment, /if all went according to plan/ it has been so long that it is no longer anything like the torment it once could've been! Just a dull, distant ache flavored with a hint of emptiness!
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>Doesn't that imply that you too have a tendency to mope?<
Yes and no. Certainly, I am prone to feeling sadness and other bad things, moreso than most I think — but that's unrelated to the music thing. That is, "I tend to be easy prey to sadness" doesn't mean I *want* to be, and I can honestly say that I have never, ever (not once in my life AFAIK) wanted to listen to a sad song or watch a sad film. It takes no discipline or conscious "hmm I am not letting this influence me" to avoid them, heh.
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¹: (like when I found a little letter my ex-wife had written me before she left; yeah... in that case actually this didn't work at all and I can feel my eyes starting to sting a bit already)
I have had bad experiences with that approach. Took me 8 years to realize I was gay. In retrospect, I really wish I was worse at compartmentalizing.
The thing is, being sad isn't actually bad, in itself. It's just an emotional experience that we choose to dislike. The approach I've found as the alternative is letting myself think about the bad shit as much as I can muster while still maintaining that detached "bad shit happens to everyone" perspective. Similar to what you're describing, but with an eye towards reaching true numbness as fast as possible through repeated exposure and practice.
The advantage is 1) you don't want to leave little emotional landmines scattered around your brain, and 2) sometimes the bad memories have useful information in or near them, information that you'd be better off having access to.
As another example of (2), I got in a really bad car accident that was partly my fault. If I didn't think about it, I can't even work towards becoming a better, safer driver because doing so means acknowledging my guilt. Of course being overwhelmed by it doesn't help either. The goal is "this is ok, but still bad, but still ok."
That's a good point; your approach reminds me of the one advocated in a lot of Buddhist sources (though I can't say what *modern* Buddhist writers tend to advocate — I only read the traditional texts, after nearly dismissing the entire program due to starting off with a milquetoast modern book on the religion... bleh!).
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— and: "little emotional landmines scattered around your brain" is a hilarious, but sometimes-unfortunately-accurate, way to describe it, heh.
[WARNING: merely "thinking out loud" for the rest of this; it's a bunch of rambling nonsense; I'm just sunk-cost-fallacy–ing myself into leaving it in — the reader can still save themselves, however! Fly, you fool!—]
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I have, after ex-wife left due to my terrible mistakes, gone all-in on the "let's paper over it and then never wander near that area again" strat (whereas, before, I still gave some consideration to the Landmine Dilemma).
Probably this is largely due to a feeling of "why bother improving now, it's too late"; like, were this a game, I would have quit and reloaded long ago — this wasn't how it was supposed to go! I don't wanna play this save any more!
...unfortunately, it appears that I am unable to find the "load game" menu.
(and, as rudderless and bereft as I feel now, four years or so on, I suppose it's sort of a waste to destroy myself over it — plus, she seems to be pretty worried and upset over my obvious deterioration, heh. so I can't just /totally/ give up.)
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thing is — per everything else in my life — I went pretty hard on the whole "it's Us, not Me, forever and always, now" thing.
We met when I was 18, and we were together 24/7 from like... week two or three up till I turned 30; and it was just *set in stone*, for me, that... like... it's US. That is how it will be.
You know what I mean? There is no consideration of alternatives — may as well mentally ready one's self to live as a collaborator in the Lizardmen Conquest of something, right, or prepare emotionally for the imminent discovery that the Earth actually IS just the shell of the Great Turtle.
Not sure I'm explaining it well (...and hold on, is this even relevant? welp, too late now—).
Just: that was the basis for all of it... alllll of it.
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Wouldn't be so hard to let go & start trying to deal with life on more standard terms, I think, if it were that SHE had had the bad taste to change her mind about me, or something, heh...
...but to have it be /my own damn fault/—
—and not even like a CHOICE, not like I DECIDED "hey I wanna be with this other chick more than you"(¹)— in fact, quite the opposite!
too little, too late; but the opposite, in truth.
Just... wish I had finally made my decision clear a little (or a lot) earlier.
Chose the right thing — but first, erred thrice;
she forgave and forgave me — but twice.
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(¹: though you can say that my actions did indeed communicate that... but it wasn't MEANT to go like that and
aargh.)
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Not to absolve myself of the error, not at all. It is no credit to me to compound selfishness and disloyalty with rank obliviousness and churlish stupidity.
No, it's just that— even when I did the bad thing, I *did not understand*... not up until the moment she found out, and began to scream and sob these great choking heaving sobs and those ragged, agonized screams... like her heart was being ripped out of her chest, like her entire world was being ripped apart.
because of me. the person I loved! the person who *counted on me!* and not even for something I actually wanted above our marriage— how fucking /stupid./
so... that is when I started thinking "uh oh, maybe... maybe this was a much worse mistake than I realized.
"maybe... might be... I forgot that inner thoughts and feelings are not the same as expressed love and loyalty; and that lack of the latter easily overcomes claims of the former."
oops.
will never forget it. never, never, never. "you were my special person. why...? /why,/ William?"
because I'm a piece of shit that's why lol. see, now my eyes are doing the thing with the saline discharge. no good can come of considering these things I was right damn it
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TL;DR:
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....so: my thought has been:
"alright, so you struggled with the tendency to excess, and to ignore/avoid/compartmentalize 'human stuff', your whole life;
& you only tried to be different because someone else counted on you;
"well, now it's just you —
— so let us see what happens, I guess!"
I go watch good animated movies for kids. Most of those are about optimism and solving problems. It consistently makes me feel better.
Are there any times when you like sad music?
"St. James Infirmary" is one of my favorite songs. "Feeling Good" is also a favorite, which I think goes to show that it's not really the lyrics, or at least not how you read them on the page.
I find that some sad music can bring a pleasant feeling of peacefulness that beats feeling anxious or overly wound up.
For me, no. I have never once in my life liked a sad song, AFAICR, and for all but a very few the feeling of being forced to listen to them anyway is *intensely* unpleasant... (Or — "intensely" relative to other such responses to stimuli, at least.).
The few exceptions — "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", say; "Laugh Laugh" by... I forgot their name whoops — I can feel some sort of beauty in... but it is still outweighed by the suffocating "GET THESE LEAD WEIGHTS OFF OF MY FIGURATIVE MUSICO-EMOTIONAL LIMBS"–feeling, heh.
Same for sad films. Same for—oh, a lot of things, actually...
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...like, a lot of people say they wouldn't wirehead themselves; I would in an instant.
Many don't wish to lose their unpleasant emotions and sensations; I would excise the capacity from myself in a heartbeat (assuming it could be done without making me a monster or dead, heh).
It's even like this with, say, food, or hobbies: most indicate they have learned to "appreciate" more "complex flavors" — I say they've learned to trick themselves into liking bitter shit (grapefruits... [shudder]); most seem to have a certain limit, like "I don't wish to eat more than a small, reasonable serving of this ice-cream, thank you 🙂"...
...I am only stopped from eating the entire tub if I'm simply already mostly full / have learned to only buy little half-pints at a time...
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...Or, when my friends and I / ex-wife and I would get into something, some new hobby or book series or game, there would inevitably come a point at which they'd say: "hey, we've been spending every waking moment doing [thing] for [hours/days/weeks]... let's do something else...?"
It's never me, I noticed, even as a kid!
Same way I'd always be the last one up, the final one of us still agitating to acquire more LSD/cocaine/hookers, when everyone else had long-since called it quits...
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(...well, the hookers part is a joke, okay! I swear–)
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I suppose I'd call it something like... some lack of complexity in my "soul"?
A tendency to excess, combined with my manufacturer not /quite/ managing to capture the exact "human" response in edge-cases like "sometimes humans want to feel other than unalloyed joy" or "sometimes humans want to stop doing a pleasurable thing because of 'moderation' or something I guess", etc...?
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I dunno... my mother and ex-wife always claimed I was missing something, heh. The former actually told the latter not to marry me; when she left she said "I see why your mother said that now — I think you love me as best as you can love anything, and you try to be a human as best as you're able... but there's definitely something different, there."
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(But she also said: "But I loved you for it, William. Why did you do this to us?"
Uh oh. I'm gonna ruin the whole thing by crying just like a regular boy now.)
The sadder I am, the more beautiful sad music becomes.
When I'm sad, the last thing I want to do is indulge in even more sadness. I love a good war movie but I'm not going anywhere near an All's Quiet or Schindler's List unless I'm in a pretty good mood. And sad music is even worse!
Feeling sad isn't being depressed.
I don't like *sad* music per se, but I tend to prefer *calmer*, *lower energy* music. Maybe that's because it makes me devote less energy to finding ways to make myself sadder, which is generally the loop my head is stuck in when I'm very sad.
There are huge social benefits to it, especially if your peer group is progressive and you present as female or some other left-coded identity (LGBTQ, BIPOC, etc.).
1. You gain social reinforcement and support. People will feel bad for you and want to help you.
2. If you can blame someone else for it, you can send your peer group after *them*, so it can be used in social battles.
3. It's an identity, sort of. You now gain a new left-coded 'badge' (see 1. above) you can use in these sorts of struggles ("As a person with mental health issues...")
The downside, of course, is that you get depressed. So the optimal strategy would be to say you're depressed but not actually be depressed, i.e. fake it. But people are often pretty good at detecting that offline. So it's more effective to actually get depressed easily...
...particularly if you don't have any other left-coded 'badges'. (Yes, that means it's most likely to happen to wealthy women with no other problems, as you can see if you read the NYT...remember Victorian neurasthenia? Fashionable TB?)
Does that really have much explanatory power? You could tell a similar story about opioid addicts or incels. Oh, they’re just leaning into a status to score social points!
You could even say the same about military veterans. They get literal badges for it.
I think you’re reading too much into a normal human interaction.
I don't think people get depressed for the social status. The original statement was about being "tricked" into feeling depressed, i.e. already feeling somewhat depressed and seeking it out further or else identifying publicly as depressed. It absolutely happens for a variety of reasons internal and external, most outside of the person's conscious control.
Opioid addicts I don't agree with, but incels--there is a certain camaraderie in it (if only online), and a guy who can't get laid is going to try to find other people to commiserate with and agitate with. And admittedly the presence of incels as an organized group does seem to have frightened some of the powers that be into dialing back their anti-male rhetoric, as they realize "men are bad" 24/7 isn't a winning strategy, at least ahead of an election. How much it's going to change things IRL is anyone's guess.
This comes across as a particularly uncharitable response that flattens every kind of human interaction into being the exact same thing.
Thank you Bryan Caplan.
Hey, I don't believe in open borders.
There's a piece missing which isn't exactly about seeing oneself as a victim. There's also seeing other people as victims. Nothing is ever good enough and everything is an emergency.
I think it's an accidental result of trying to get things right.
If the seminal Pixar film Inside Out is to be believed, depression is a numbing experience, which can be superficially better than un-numbed sadness, although less healthy than just experiencing the sadness in the long run.
From the outside, the entirety of therapy culture looks like people paying to be tricked into believing or feeling something. I suppose if you tricked yourself IN to it, maybe you can trick yourself OUT, but I remain baffled that any of this works on people who are self-aware and had a genuine basis for arriving at the conclusion or mental state that prompted their distress. When you leave the magic show, you don't keep believing in magic even if you let yourself be tricked.
it seems we need some reasonable unreasonableness (default optimism and naivety, prosocial trust), and depression is usually the lack of this. so therapy (for example behavior activation, CBT) is focusing on this
of course usually people have plenty of real shit from home/school/work that they are blind to, which leads them to repeatedly get into distressing situations, so after some work on skills (boundaries, empathy, usual self-management coaching stuff) the activated behaviors have a better chance of leading to better than expected outcomes, which then overall with the cognitive reframing from CBT ought to instill a sustainable positive bias
“(as the old saying goes, everyone has someone who’s better than them and someone who’s worse than them, with two exceptions. And any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.)”
This is false if the world is infinite :). Aside from the pedantry, great article!
This is *possibly* false if the world is infinite.
It's almost definitely false. Two possibilities:
1) Either there's an infinitely ascending hierarchy of awesomeness, in which case there's no max.
2) There's a maximum score had by infinite people. But then it won't be that only one person is surpassed.
The max score could be held by a finite number of people. E.g. an infinite number of people have a score in [0, 1) and one person has a score of 1.
Right, that's possible, but it's very unlikely. Why would one guy be special?
Parent didn’t claim it was likely, only that it was possible.
He was intending to correct my claim. So if my claim is almost certain, the correction is mistaken.
Maybe the most unhappy man would cease being the most unhappy man.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-22
Okay, time to roll up our sleeves and go for some parables and folk tales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stonecutter
"In the legend, a poor stone-cutter craves to become a rich man, then a prince; his wishes are granted in turn by a mountain spirit. He then enviously desires to become the sun, impervious to heat; then clouds, undaunted by the sun; then the mountain, which withstands the rain which falls from the clouds. But when a stone-cutter starts chipping away at him, he wants to revert to being a man, and comes to the realization that he is satisfied with his station in life as a humble stone-cutter."
Sometimes a function only has one maximum.
Maybe all copies of the perfect person are equivalent, so there is only one.
>Maybe all copies of the perfect person are equivalent, so there is only one.
A human version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe ? :-)
Would that require the same number (+-1) of the antimatter version of the perfect person? :-)
As a third possibility, the set of souls is not well-ordered, because the question of which of two people is more awesome is, objectively and in the fully general case, undecidable. "Treat as equal until proven otherwise, and don't go *trying* to prove otherwise without a damn good reason" could then be necessary as a patch to prevent infinite loops or other wasteful errors.
Note that this can still be true even if many such comparisons are easy to resolve.
I don't think it makes any sense to compare yourself to anyone whose existence is entirely outside your lightcone.
Agreed (barring a Tardis).
It's possible for an infinite world to contain only finitely many people, as seems overwhelmingly likely to be true of ours. Even if *the world* is infinite, only finitely many people have yet been born and there is some reason to suspect only finitely many people will be.
I don't think that's likely to be true of ours, but granted, that's theoretically possible. If the world is infinite in size, then infinite people will have been born.
Only finitely many people have been born *that we know of*. Maybe more people were born beyond the edge of the observable universe. If the universe is infinite, and there's not some cosmic law ensuring humanity (or any other species that qualifies as people) only evolve a finite number of times, we'd expect an infinite number of people.
Now, I know the obvious response to this is that with an infinite number of people, we'd expect infinitely many perfect people to exist, but I disagree. After all, we're still only talking about countably infinite people, but if we can express how good a person is as a real number, there's uncountably many values for how good they can possibly be. And that's even assuming it's possible. Maybe the set of values for how good you can be is an open set, and thus someone could be arbitrarily close to perfect, but not actually perfect, in much the same way that a massive object can travel arbitrarily close to the speed of light, but not at the speed of light.
Also, he was just making a simple joke and you're taking it too seriously. Though not nearly as seriously as I just took it. Taking things too seriously is fun. :)
The world contains only so many atoms, which keep getting recycled (and a very few get lost, like helium, and a very few are gained, like meteors). A finite number of atoms means a finite number of combinations of them. Ergo, a finite number of people can exist on Earth.
If some combination of atoms happens to come together in the same configuration twice, is it the same person?
It's definitely false, as it assume a world in a uniform state. It is almost always true that whether one person is better than another depends on the environment they are situated within. That there exist exceptional cases (e.g. cystic fibrosis) and borderline cases (e.g. sickle cell) does not render that general statement false.
OTOH, this almost always means that a blanket statement "person A is genetically inferior to person B" is an overgeneralization, as it is assuming an unstated environment. The idea of the existence of a total-ordering of genetic quality is an error. (One example of the is the existence of multiple species.)
Assuming humans aren't really apples to apples, large numbers of people are incomparable. This is usually true in practice; you may compare yourself to a few (generally similar) people, but not to everyone.
Unfortunately, even if a system where only one person is allowed to feel good about themselves is bad, it's not really "up to us" to decide that system. Reminds me of the peerlessness of the greeks
You and Lance have equal moral value in the sense that utilitarianism says that the same weight should be given to each of your preferences. If you and Lance were the only humans (so the ability to improve the lives of others was irrelevant), and one of you had to die, utilitarianism would either be agnostic or decide based on something like who wanted to keep living more.
Only bounded preference utilitarianism, I think.
But what if Lance's preferences are more strongly held? This gets much more extreme with hedonistic utilitarianism. If what matters is happiness, then someone's moral value is proportional to how happy they are, and anyone sad has negative moral value.
Also, does Scott have more moral value than a cow? If not every animal has equal moral value, we'd expect not every human would have quite equal moral value either. Maybe Lance has more brain cells and is more sentient or however that works.
Their preferences would still each be accorded equal weight, in the same way that your money and my money count the same per $, even though we might possess or bid differing amounts of money.
The point with hedonic utilitarianism is that the same change in material circumstances can bring about different levels of happiness, and it's the happiness that counts -- so evening out the happiness means unequal material interventions.
The utilitarian wouldn't aim to even out the happiness, they'd aim to maximise the happiness. But it's trivially true that maximising happiness might lead to giving different people different levels of material aid. The point is simply that the utilitarian assigns equal weigh to the preferences or hedons of each.
Having more strongly held preferences was not one of the things that it was specified that Lance was superior in. And it's not clear that having super strongly held preferences is universally a good thing. The most death-adverse person in the world is probably not actually very happy.
But I guess my point is that many versions of utilitarianism would say that Scott and Lance are equal in exactly the way that Scott and the cow are not equal, and this holds regardless of whether Lance somehow has a lot more brain cells.
We can admit that Lance's preference is more valuable in this case, but also admit that the difference is small enough that using it in ours not-perfect finite-computing-power ethical calculations/euristics would provide less utility than simply not doing it.
Because doing it would provoke overestimation of difference and the result of such calculation would be less precise in expectation. And also because it would make Scott feel bad.
But the difference between the human and the cow is much much bigger.
This generalises to a lot of consequentialist systems, and is part and parcel with the example about who gets the parachute - if Lance is very good at improving the lives of other Lances, but Scott's better at improving the lives of other Scotts, do Lances and Scotts each count for the same amount? If so, that's the equal moral worth. If not, it all gets recursive and weird if you don't ground morality in something different.
(eg. if you say Lance-type people's wellbeing matters more because they're bigger and stronger, that's arbitrary but externally grounded; if you say Lance-type people's wellbeing matters more because they help Lance-type people more and Lance-type people's wellbeing matters more, that's circular)
It seemed like Scott was comparing how good he and Lance are helping people in general, as opposed to helping others of their own type.
Is that something you added for the sake of example, or something you saw in the original?
Added for the sake of the example, but my point is more that if it doesn't matter who they're helping (which it doesn't seem to in the original), then that's the relevant equality.
Completely agreed, but I think you can generalize to other moral systems as well. Regardless of the moral system, you both have equal status as moral patients. I've always assumed this is what was meant when people say that everyone is equally valuable.
Why would admitting that Lance is superior to you make you depressed? I think it's great that there are people who are overall better than me, whom I can look up to and respect. Thinking this doesn't diminish me in any way, or commit me to deprioritizing myself. (Another problem solved by ethical egoism! I need not be better in any objective way to put myself first.)
>But I've learned over the course of my life that a shocking number of people are deeply, deeply envious
I'm curious, could you elaborate? Along what dimension are they envious? Economically? Medically? Sexually? Power? Prestige? Some other form of status or resource?
( Personally, I wish I had my youth back, but, of course, that is _impossible_ as biotech currently stands. I'm admittedly pretty lucky economically, though not in the 1%, but I have a very hard time imagining being significantly envious of anyone that I know of. )
>Along the lines of sociometric status. So "popularity", intelligence, and perceived sexual access are the big dimensions where I've seen the green-eyed monster come out in a way that I wasn't expecting.
Many Thanks! Hmm... I could see wanting better intelligence (more specifically, more reliable short-term and long-term memory...). As for the rest, I have a mildly jaundiced view, "Be careful what you wish for". Popularity can imply _unwanted_ attention at times, and re sexual access - well, all relationships have trade-offs. Personally, I was married to my late wife for over 30 years, and, even after decades of discussions there were still some sore points even in our last years.
Good point. It's great to see that other people are better at certain things - it gives you something to strive for, and hope that some day you may be as good as they are, or at least better than you are now.
if you do get better, you dont have to be depressed -- but repeated failure may well depress you.
I'd prefer to put myself first /and/ be better in every way, personally. Just to really rub it in, you know.
The intrusive thought pattern goes something like: "Lance is genetically superior to me. This implies that if my parents had to decide between my embryo and Lance's, they would have picked Lance's. I am, therefore, the suboptimal option; a mistake. I should not have existed. Indeed, there are large groups of people saying people like me should not exist right now. Perhaps it is not too late to rectify the mistake."
But YOU are not your genetic configuration or your embryo? This reminds me of people who say "it would be horrible to know my mother contemplated abortion", even if she did this wasn't about you because YOU didn't exist then? Idk maybe I have too time bound notions of personhood, but I just don't understand why people would identify with the zygote they developed from?
Another analogy is worrying that your long term partner could have found someone better/more suited, in the sense of "not being the best possible match". Sure. But they didn't. They're with you.
There is no original mistake because there was no Embryo Lance to pick. Had EL existed, he'd have been picked and you wouldn't be here. The choice isn't between the world with you and the world with Lance, the choice is between the world with you and without Lance and the world without either of you or Lance. And the last option is only plausible if you're genuinely net negative for the world, which for most humans approximates to people you personally know/know you, and while it's not impossible, it's pretty unlikely.
Being suboptimal doesn't mean being worthless. Otherwise we fall into some kind of "everyone is beautiful and noone is more beautiful than others and to say otherwise is literal genocide" weirdness.
"Another analogy is worrying that your long term partner could have found someone better/more suited, in the sense of "not being the best possible match". Sure."
Indeed, that is also an incredibly familiar pattern of intrusive thoughts. Thanks.
> "but I just don't understand why people would identify with the zygote they developed from?"
I don't understand why people *wouldn't*. If you're going to identify with anything, at all, ever, surely zygote/baby/child/general-past-you is the first thing to come to mind? It does, after all, have a great deal of ontological continuity.
> "Another analogy is worrying that your long term partner could have found someone better/more suited, in the sense of "not being the best possible match". Sure."
Weird, I think this in a positive way. "Heh, I have cheated fate, and done better than I deserve. My partner and their actual fated One True Pairing: they lose out for my gain, hahahaha, suckers"
Yes this. I am happy that numerous people are better than me on many dimensions, and occasionally IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY. I don't need to be the best (tho not being the worst satisfied the gross social monkey brain that constantly keeps comparing). I just need to be at some acceptable level on some things that matter to me. That level is not relative (unless in a very abstract sense) and certainly nowhere near the ceiling of humanely possible.
Because that's what the emotions of happiness and depression evolved for. Success and status gains make you feel happy, and the happiness makes you pursue them -- the inverse for status loss and failure.
Note how the manifestations of depression -- quiet voice downcast eyes, slouching posture -- all signal low status.
What status could be lower than self-hatred?
Agreed. It would probably be more depressing if I *didn't* think there was anyone superior to me.
I think the bad but true answer is that our idea of capitalism/'meritocracy' is predicated on everyone being in competition with everyone on every axis all the time, and so anyone in your orbit being better than you at anything is a direct threat to your value and outcomes.
Like, think about how we talk about 'mating markets'. If you really believe that everyone has a 'mate value' and the markets sort themselves out with matches going from top to bottom, then anyone superior to you joining your social circle means you get bumped down to the next-less-attractive mate.
I don't think that's actually how it happens, but the metaphors and models we use for these things makes it feel that way.
>"…anyone in your orbit being better than you at anything is a direct threat to your value and outcomes."
Comparative advantage to the rescue; as long as they're not exactly proportionally better in all dimensions simultaneously, there are still gains from trade to be had.
I don't think comparative advantage really applies to unique, high-value goods in one-off trade decisions?
Like if I have some ming vases and the Oppenheimer Blue, and you have Rubens' Venus and Adonis, and we'd both consider trading, how do we decide on the optimal trade?
And that's before considering the effects of time on people / relationships (as in, everyone ages or changes at different rates and in different directions, and most relationships decline in quality).
Comparative advantage is much more about ongoing production capabilities, and I think has little applicability to decisions like this.
Rereading, I realize I may have originally misread the above excerpt ("…anyone in your orbit being better than you at anything is a direct threat to your value and outcomes.") interpreting the word "anything" as equivalent to "everything" in this context; if that was not the intended meaning, then my response is something of a non sequitur.
Nevertheless, I do not understand your point.
>"…little applicability to decisions like this."
Decisions like what?
> Decisions like what?
Mating market decisions, as per the parent comment.
AFAICT, there's no easy way to see the parent of one's own comment; if there is, I would appreciate a pointer.
Without that context (especially with my likely misinterpretation of the excerpt I quoted), I was lost.
ETA: I stumbled on the comment I originally replied to, and the mention of mating markets is in a paragraph following the bit I quoted. I was responding to the bailey of the first paragraph.
I find it helpful to separate people into their capabilities and their capacity for experience (I'm sure there's a better term for this but I don't know it.) Lance may have superior capabilities to you and for that reason it may maximize utility to save his life over yours. But externalities aside, you are equal in the sense that you both equally deserve happiness and equally don't deserve pain. That is, although others may be more or less capable than you, no one is more or less deserving than you.
Deserving of what? Isn't that the same sort of gotcha ambiguity Scott is criticizing about inferiority in the post?
Imagine if Scott and Lance were both hungry, and I have two meals that are identical in every way except one tastes better than the other. It won't help Lance more effectively improve the world or anything, it just tastes better. Does Lance deserve it more than Scott?
The point is that the "save a life" question is confounded by the fact that saving my life both makes me happy and also allows me to perform various tasks. Most things are like that: my go-to example is that paying surgeons a lot of money saves them time and keeps them healthier in various ways that actually help them surgeon better, it's not just a reward for being so cool. But if hypothetically we can think of some reward that really truly is just a reward, and not a tool, then the Lance/Scott distinction evaporates (according to those who endorse "everyone is equal")
Okay. I was thrown off by an inappropriate idiosyncratic thought, and just blurted.
"Tastes better" is, of course, subjective (which I think also gets to the heart of the question, in considering whole-person value judgements). Perhaps it's a vegetarian curry, which Scott likes but Lance, being a carnivore, doesn't like as well.
Sure, people can agree on some things (more money is better, more time is better, better to be alive than dead) but even in trying to formulate examples I'm finding it hard to find universal things on which people would agree. Larger house is better? Some people will think it wasteful and prefer a smaller house. Faster car? It uses more resources for power. Bicycle is better than a car? Too slow for some people.
this seems irrelevant to the question-- if they prefer different meals then it's not the situation described. If they both prefer the same meal, with the same degree of preference, then they are equal.
The point is that whatever criteria you use to divide the meals, Lance's relative superiority at math/sports/charity isn't relevant
No, my point really is that "better" is subjective. How do you know whether someone is "better" at math? Yes, most people agree Einstein was better than average, but in life, everything has a trade-off. It may be hard to tell what the trade-off is for math skills, but sometimes it's poorer social skills. Most nerds, myself included, wouldn't give up technical skills for social skills even if it were a choice to be made.
If you compare two people, it isn't really possible to say one is objectively better than another. One must use value judgements. One can say one is better at, say, solving problems which math helps solve, but that doesn't make them a better person overall.
that's literally the argument made in the entire post. There's no rule that says all of our various advantages and disadvantages have to equal out to being the same. If you define "superior" as "measurably better", then for sure some people have higher total genetic advantages than others. And if you define it as "morally equal under utilitarianism (or the eyes of God, or whatever)", then genetic advantages are irrelevant, don't even need to be mentioned.
It seems like the possibility/inevitability of pain is a baseline of existence. It isn't about deserving or undeserving. You will experience it and how you face it down or how you decide to integrate it helps shape your character. Experiencing it, both physical and psychic or spiritual, are essential. Without them you will not understand what others experience and will not be motivated to prevent yourself causing pain to others. Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are rooted in what happens when you don't experience pain as the main character has leprosy.
>…. It isn't about deserving or undeserving. You will experience it and how you face it down or how you decide to integrate it helps shape your character.
There’s truth in this imo
There seems to be a common sentiment that some people DO deserve pain as a punishment for doing bad things. For instance, I bet a lot of people would say Hitler deserves pain.
Are you taking the position that no amount of misdeeds can ever make someone deserve pain? If so, are you against punishments in general, or only certain kinds of punishments?
Are you also against rewards for merit? For instance, is it wrong to pay a bonus to the employee with the best performance, because all employees are equally deserving of whatever happiness money can buy?
Nobody intrinsically deserves pain, but sometimes it maximizes utility for everyone to punish people. I'm in favor of killing/imprisoning Hitler because doing so prevents worse things from happening (both from Hitler and those who want to imitate him but will be deterred by his punishment.) I'm not in favor of tormenting him in ways that don't provide any benefit.
I think you could make a similar case for employee rewards. All employees equally "deserve" to enjoy the rewards, but giving them only to well-performing employees is still a good idea because it results in better productivity.
Given the capacity to go back in time and assassinate Hitler, it would probably be better to bribe an art school to keep him busy and out of trouble by handing them a pile of modern consumer electronics, along with the recommendation that whatever bits they can't make good use of themselves should be sold to Alan Turing.
1. Even if one person might deserve the last parachute more than another, I think there is a sense we treat people equally in normal circumstances. As in being forced to sit at the back of the bus. I think inferiority is tied to this idea.
2. I think we are suspicious that calling people inferior is being done without the kind of rigorous evaluation Scott presents in this article and so it is generally best to avoid such judgements.
I'd argue that putting any thought at all into what embryo you want is still a more rigorous evaluation than the more common method of just having a baby at random. Even if you're Hitler and your entire basis is how Aryan they are, as long as being Aryan isn't actively bad you're not making things any worse.
To be clear I'm not advocating against embryo selection, but rather explaining what the philosophy of "you aren't inferior to anyone".
The danger, and what I think people fear when they argue against this, is that by allowing culture to value something like "Aryan" above something else (at least "non-Aryan" but much more likely something else specific like "Jew" or "Gypsy" or whatever) we risk getting into a situation where already-living people are valued differently as well. Using your example, Hitler was able to get a lot of people to agree with him about giving huge benefits to some and cause huge harm to others, based on these categories.
Down Syndrome is a much trickier example than cystic fibrosis. It's also an area where we're seeing selective abortion being approved of and even lauded in some societies. It's not hard to imagine a society that takes that further - marginalizing the few that have the condition, limiting their rights (involuntary confinements, etc.), offering euthanasia to their parents even after they are born, and - not yet but maybe in the future - requiring euthanasia or for someone to guarantee that such people will not become burdens on the state/society.
We probably can't do anything about people having personal preferences, though we may be able to influence their preferences. We certainly can do something about what we allow people to do medically or what outward expressions of their preferences we tolerate.
This is an excellent comment, and my desire for a LIKE button is reinforced.
For a historical example, look up Aktion T4, fueled by the nasty combination of eugenic philosophy, Nazi racial propaganda, and wartime economic pressures.
> Down Syndrome is a much trickier example than cystic fibrosis. It's also an area where we're seeing selective abortion being approved of and even lauded in some societies. It's not hard to imagine a society that takes that further - marginalizing the few that have the condition, limiting their rights (involuntary confinements, etc.), offering euthanasia to their parents even after they are born, and - not yet but maybe in the future - requiring euthanasia or for someone to guarantee that such people will not become burdens on the state/society.
This doesn't seem to follow, at least for modern Western societies. Modern Western ethics treats all conscious humans as ethically important & therefore deserving of life, unless (& not everyone accepts this exception) they actually prefer not to live, & of freedom, unless they are mentally incapable of understanding & decision (e.g. young children, involuntary mental patients) or choose to act sufficiently immorally (imprisoned criminals). Selective abortion of fetuses with Down Syndrome doesn't provoke outrage (except among pro-life people) because it happens before the fetus has become a conscious person as most people would see it, & so there is no ethical problem with aborting the fetus in order to have a superior (more able, less sick) child. Involuntary killing of disabled people, even pre-rational infants (cf. the reaction to Peter Singer), does provoke general outrage because such people are generally seen as people deserving of rights. Likewise, most people would be outraged at the imprisonment of a disabled person who has committed no crime & who is capable of rational decision entirely because of their disability. This might change in a situation where resources are scarce enough that supporting the disabled imposes substantial costs on the rest of the population (e.g. from food scarcity in preindustrial societies or during wars or similar crises), but that does not seem likely in the foreseeable future in the developed Western countries.
It is true that such consequences might come to pass in a culture that did not value human life & personal freedom, e.g. the common abandonment of unwanted children & acceptance of enslavement in some ancient cultures. The Nazis' killing of the disabled is also an example of this, since Nazi ideology held that genetically inferior people were unworthy of life (though the populace of Nazi Germany didn't entirely agree: the Nazis pretended to end the T4 program after widespread protest against it, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4 ).
While I agree that *current* norms in Western countries would not support the killing of adults with Down Syndrome or various other conditions, that wasn't at all my point. My concern is that by allowing different norms now, we will alter how people feel about those kinds of conditions in a way that makes it easier to move towards new norms. We should not be comfortable simply stating that it's not preferred now, especially when preferences have noticeably shifted in related areas in the last 10 or so years. For instance euthanasia has become much more acceptable in Western countries over that time period. Selective abortion has as well. These are not minor changes in norms.
For evidence, I pointed to times in the past when norms were different and people really did feel more comfortable killing the disabled and mentally challenged. In fact, in some specific cases even lots of people with no mental or physical issues at all, just based on cultural differences and an acceptance of death/imprisonment/forced labor as a means to deal with them.
Coincidentally rewatched Gattaca recently, which was largely about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
> limiting their rights (involuntary confinements, etc.)
Aren't we already limiting their rights? I was under the impression that they're basically considered minors their whole lives. Which means they can be involuntarily confined. Or are you saying that we as a society have already gone to far with Down Syndrome?
Personally, I think we're teetering on the edge of "too far" with Down Syndrome specifically. But my point is more general, with DS being an example since society is already considering giving them fewer rights than they currently have (I consider not being selectively aborted a type of "right" even though that's not really a thing in most countries).
Canada expanding the range of who can be considered for euthanasia is perhaps a better example. A few years ago the current list would seem insane, and a few years from now it's likely to have been expanded. Apparently in 2022 4.1% of all Canadian deaths were from formal assisted suicide.
I don't want to have a debate about whether assisted suicide is okay or whether the list of acceptable reasons is good or bad. Just pointing out that when we as a society devalue human life, we keep going with it and death is often the end result. We can still agree that's okay, but we should be very aware before breaking Shelling fences that we may not have a good stopping place before we find ourselves euthanizing Down Syndrome or schizophrenia adults or whatever thing we might currently find impossible to believe.
"We certainly can do something about what we allow people to do medically or what outward expressions of their preferences we tolerate."
Or you could just mind your own business. "To avoid you maybe/potentially limiting my rights many years in the future, I need to limit your rights now" is an argument that goes both ways. Maybe you're the one who needs to be silenced, stripped of voting rights, or deported from the country?
I feel like you're reading me backwards, as I'm advocating for *not* removing people's voting rights or deporting them or whatever negative thing.
If I have a preference for killing people I find inferior, I would hope you would stop me from carrying that out, or jail me if I try/succeed. I'm not advocating that you silence me in this case.
If I have a preference for not hanging out with people I find inferior, then that's not illegal and shouldn't be, and we all move along with our lives (but feel free to not like me or hang out with me because of my choice).
"I feel like you're reading me backwards, as I'm advocating for *not* removing people's voting rights or deporting them or whatever negative thing."
Then what was "we certainly can do something about what we allow people to do medically" about?
Euthanasia, forced sterilization, selective abortion. I'm talking about the kind of things that have been forced on poor people and "mentally deficient" people quite a few times in the last hundred or so years.
I think there knock on effects that come from as well as inevitable consequences to “trying to make babies as strangers as possible” that can definitely make things worse.
Being human is giving the last parachute to someone else because you believe they are more deserving, not demanding the last parachute because you are more deserving. It is noble to give up your bus seat to someone you think deserves it more, but not to claim a bus seat because you need it more.
Unless you happen to be Lebron James, it's hard to play a lot of sports and not be frequently reminded that you are genetically inferior to some people at that sport.
It's curious how America has a sports crazed culture, but our intellectual conventional wisdom has learned so little from sports.
I'm reminded of how President Obama read David Epstein's insightful 2013 human biodiversity book "The Sports Gene" and was so much taken by what he read that in the dog days of his late second term, he took to lecturing guests on what he'd learned from it. Obama is a well-read guy, but he seemed to react so positively to Epstein's book that my guess is he was thinking, "Finally, in my 50s, they publish a book that makes sense out of the patterns I've observed in decades of playing basketball and golf and watching ESPN Sportscenter."
We don't mind people differing in athletic ability because we don't attach any inherent importance to it. It's a nice thing to have but otherwise inconsequential and certainly not something to boast about.
But modern American culture, particularly that of progressive white-collar middle class people, absolutely does attach inherent importance to being smart. It's thekey to career success and social standing. Of course, we like to tell ourselves we don't since that would run afoul of "All Men Are Created Equal" and all that. But at a certain level we know we're lying to ourselves, so the idea that people might differ in their inherent capacity for intelligence bugs us on a fundamental level.
I think we do attach inherent importance to athletic ability, but damned if I can prove that's how the culture views athletic ability.
I read _The Sports Gene_, and it leaves me wondering what sports are supposed to do-- I already wondered that, but the book underlines it. It seems like all that competition is supposed to prove something, but what?
Sports are training for war and hunting, the most important activities of the male half of the human race for most of the generations of human prehistory.
More accurately, many sports used to be training for war and hunting.
More accurately, sports are an outlet for the urges that are also needed for war and hunting.
Yes. Though what I had in mind more was that much of modern wars are more about logistics and preparation and general pencil pushing, than about anything to do with sports.
There's still an athletic side to war. But it's not nearly as decisive as it used to be.
These days, sports also seem to be about the war on boredom.
Cue arguments on whether competitive eating is a sport.
It's be more of a sport if it allowed contact. :-)
I would say it qualifies as a contest but not a sport.
And I would wager that if you offered young males a choice between being 1 SD more athletic and physically attractive and 1 SD more intelligent, many, if not most, would choose the additional athleticism. The same pattern would be true for young women given the choice between more beauty and attractiveness versus greater intelligence. Intellectuals hugely overvalue intelligence compared to other people.
Do they overvalue it? Lots of animals are more athletic than humans, but we hunt them for fun.
If we don't bother hunting the predictably less-athletic animals due to the lack of resultant fun, that's still a type of value.
How are you gonna passively throw in "physically attractive" as if it's not massively more valuable and high-status than either athleticism or intelligence
I recommend _The Sport Gene_-- it's interesting about what counts as a useful genetic advantage for a sport and what doesn't. For example, top batters don't have especially fast reflexes, what they've got is great eyesight.
Women who win marathons are generally short because of the need for heat dissipation. But slightly taller women win in cooler weather. This is what got me onto the question of what sports are about.
There's also genetic (?) variation in how much people get from training.
> We don't mind people differing in athletic ability because we don't attach any inherent importance to it. It's a nice thing to have but otherwise inconsequential and certainly not something to boast about.
Having a more athletic body to show off certainly helps in finding a mate. That's very important for many people.
That's instrumental value, not inherent.
I would say that we inherently value attractive partners. From the perspective of evolution-as-optimizer it's instrumental, but it embedded the preference in us inherently
Sounds like everything might be an instrumental value by those standards?
A relevant book to mention in that context is Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart". https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/by-request-the-cult-of-smart
>We don't mind people differing in athletic ability because we don't attach any inherent importance to it.
Some people believe "football's not a matter of life and death -- it's much more important than that".
It's less inherent importance, and more that people decide their status within reference classes. Sport is unimportant to people who are geting their status from education, money etc.
I don't think anyone actually believe football is life or death, but I take your point that different social groups attach importance to different traits with varying weight. I tried to make that point by emphasizing that I was talking about the liberal/progressive set that comprises so much of our intelligentsia, but I could have been more explicit.
The situation is very weird. We *do* attach inherent importance on high levels of athletic ability, to the point that such people can get paid millions of dollars per year. But nobody, however leftist, seems to complain about it. OTOH, the fraction of people who can get paid for athletic ability is a small fraction of one percent, so the difference between "ordinary" people in athletic ability is generally irrelevant.
Then again, the politics of even that can be complicated. E.g. I can make a movie about basketball titled "White Men Can't Jump" but it gets dicey to assert that American Blacks are generally better muscled than American Whites, even though that also has something to do with basketball (and probably with why so many slaves were bought from West Africa).
I've definitely seen complaints about college sports coaches getting paid better than anyone else in the public sector, particularly non-athletics-oriented teachers.
"We don't mind people differing in athletic ability because we don't attach any inherent importance to it."
We don't?
I mean, I do.
The 50 highest paid athletes in the world make an average of $78 million each, so at least some people seem to assign athletic ability importance.
Successful entertainers are well paid, including athletes.
If you're extremely athletically talented but just one step down from the "major leagues" that people bother to watch, you earn poverty wages for your talents, if you earn wages at all.
Come on, you know what happened (and it's the reason your career took so long to take off). Nobody wants to touch you-know-what because (1) it reminds everyone of the Nazis (2) there's a whole intellectual edifice built around denying any sort of genetic component to lots of things at least in part because it might lead to that (3) it undermines a large argument for redistribution since you can't blame all disparities on environment anymore.
Buying my dad a copy of Noticing for Father's Day, BTW. I'm going to stack it under copies of White Fragility and Anti-Racist Baby I bought at Ollie's, and fill in the rest of the empty space in the box with Trump ties.
Thanks!
I think you have outthought yourself here:
You wrote: "Another possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am"
I believe this is very wrong. In fact, the crashing airplane example actually shows why. I don't know anyone who believes in that scenario (or even the more likely scenario of limited space in the lifeboats) that the "superior" person should get priority. In fact, the idea of superiority sounds ridiculous to me. In this actual scenario historically, at least a scenario where the person doesn't have special skills that may help the group, who would get the parachutes or lifeboats seats would be chosen based first on age and gender ("women and children first") and then perhaps by lots.
We (correctly in my view) don't believe that a more naturally gifted or skilled person is a "superior person" in a fundamental sense. To the extent that we call someone a "better person" it usually has more to do with (1) what they have done with what they have and (2) how they treat others rather than basing that judgement on skills and abilities.
I think this is right, but maybe does not go deep enough. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that the question of superiority is irrelevant in many scenarios except a few narrow ones involving directly the skills required.
I think that it's not just irrelevant, but it is toxic and will lead to awful outcomes. Except the cases in which superiority in a given skill is the point, like in a sport competition, the concept itself of superiority should never be in people's minds. Because the natural next step is to think what to do once we established the ranking. For instance, denying people help when it comes to a crashing airplane.
Scott makes the humble thought experiment of him being the "inferior" but what if we turn it to its head? Would Scott take the parachute for himself if he was on a crashing airplane with a person who writes slightly worse posts about effective altruism than him?
The concept itself of putting numbers on everything to rank them up leads inevitably to monstrous outcomes -- whether those are "worth points" like in this post, or dollars in a market quantifying everything including opinions, or many other scenarios (my relationship ended because my partner insisted that we should split 50/50 the amount of minutes of every chore in the house, which of course led both of us to try and find ways of cheat the other by counting things differently and make it so the other always "owed" us minutes of free time... yikes!).
I think we're in passionate agreement here Mikk. At least, I agree with everything you wrote in your comment.
Is it clear that we can evade the dilemmas by refusing to do the math? I think the math is mostly useless handwaving unless you are a hospital admin setting budgets. But that won’t help me if I find myself in a real dilemma.
I don't think we are *refusing* to do the math, we are just acknowledging that the math is not something we as mortals can sensibly do. You cannot ask which of these two people will create more utils, because utils are not real things.
> because utils are not real things
I disagree. You can experience utils for yourself by putting your hand on a hot stove.
Exactly how many (negative, presumably) utils will I get?
I'm not saying utility isn't real, I'm saying utils aren't real. Utility can't be quantified or compared mathematically.
> Utility can't be quantified or compared mathematically.
Not all sets need to be totally ordered for comparison to be possible between most elements:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_set
I'm pretty sure that you're using mathematical comparisons all the time when judging between amounts of utility. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any reason to prefer one outcome over another.
As for how many utils you'll get, that depends on what scale you use. Just like how we can use Celsius or Fahrenheit, the numbers will be very different, but the thing being measured is always the same.
Actually, I think we can prove even to the most fundamentalistic utilitarian that "Women and children first (and then men draw lots)" is the best solution.
90% of people who watch Titanic will agree that it is right to let the women and children go first, and that the men rich men who muscle into the life boats are total jerks. Most people have a high preference for living in a world where we don't have to believe we and everyone else are jerks.
If somehow we made it common and accepted knowlege that "great scientists and highly productive engineers go first", everybody (including the scientists) would feel a lot worse about the world they lived in. Even if they never will be on a sinking ship in need of lifeboats.
But by establishing the new rule you are probably saving less than one great medicine inventor pr year.
So you would be be trading a large amount of depression for the entire population in exchange for a tiny amount of extra progress. Doing the math implies we should not consider worth/inferiority when handing out lifejackets.
In Nozick's thought experiment in which people could choose which world to live in, would people choose to live in the children-first world rather than the one that prioritized great scientists?
Based on reactions to Titanic, I believe almost all would prefer to live in children-first world
Maybe that's because we already live in children-first world. It's plausible that people from great-scientists-first world would also prefer to stay in their world.
That's not even that weird of a conclusion. Children are the literal hope for the future.
A society that sacrifices their children for the good of the adults is a society that destroys itself permanently for a short term benefit to the current generation.
Yeah, it might be hardwired by evolution. Or maybe not. Im pretty agnostic about how humans got to be what they are.
But one funny thing: If all people who became chemical engineers for medicine companies were told that they now had a duty to grab parachutes out of the hands of pregnant women... I think fewer people would want to work in the medical industry.
Counterargument: Fertile adults can make more children. Sufficiently young children do not survive without adults.
It should be remembered that the logic of women and children first is not necessarily that they're more valuable but that they're less likely to survive a couple of hours in the freezing cold water without a lifeboat.
The year is 1943. A passenger ship is torpedoed while carrying Alan Turing (the allies' best codebreaker), John Von Neumann (the allies' best polymath), and some 16-year-old rapists. Who should get priority on the lifeboats?
Maybe sometimes the calculation problem is hard enough to require deontological guardrails. Or self-serving biases would create disagreement about rankings that can be evaded by drawing lots. But it's also easy to construct scenarios where the calculation problem is too easy to require any calculation at all. Pre-committing to refusing to rank people can cost you arbitrarily large amounts of utility in those scenarios.
Refusing to do the math seems popular in moral philosophy https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/puzzles-for-everyone
> I believe this is very wrong. In fact, the crashing airplane example actually shows why. I don't know anyone who believes in that scenario (or even the more likely scenario of limited space in the lifeboats) that the "superior" person should get priority. In fact, the idea of superiority sounds ridiculous to me. In this actual scenario historically, at least a scenario where the person doesn't have special skills that may help the group, who would get the parachutes or lifeboats seats would be chosen based first on age and gender ("women and children first") and then perhaps by lots.
I'd say that in ordinary lifeboat scenarios you're right, but in extreme ones Scott is right. Like if you've got a brilliant biologist vs, well, someone of no particular note, you pick the former. But if it's a non-extreme case, you choose by lot rather than argue over who deserves it more.
Why? Basically because if there's even remotely any ambiguity, arguing is not going to lead to any agreement as everyone favors themselvs, and it probably breaks out into violence, which will be needlessly destructive, whereas the casting of lots is mutually agreeable and can hopefully prevent that. But as the difference increases, this A. increases how much it matters to pick the right person, and B. decreases the ambiguity of the right answer, leading to picking this way being more mutually agreeable with a lower chance of violence. So I would say there is some point at which it tips over from the one solution to the other.
In a lifeboat situation, folks would likely agree to favor someone if they believe they have a unique set of skills (e.g. the ability to navigate at sea) that are necessary to help the group survive.
But I don't believe folks would choose the better biologist or say Mozart over Salieri. While we might recognize that they would make better contributions to the world, we don't believe that makes them "better people." And in fact, if they were to make the case that their superior skills mean they should be favored to get a seat on the lifeboat, we would actually see that as a sign that they are in reality a worse person.
> But I don't believe folks would choose the better biologist or say Mozart over Salieri
OK, but that wasn't the hypothetical I discussed. In a case like you're suggesting, yeah, probably best to draw lots. Sure one of these people may be the best choice, but it isn't so stunningly unambiguous that you can successfully argue that and avoid violence. I said at *some* point it does tip over, and you haven't addressed that (unless like you don't actually disagree and that's why you haven't addressed it).
> While we might recognize that they would make better contributions to the world, we don't believe that makes them "better people."
As the post says, I don't know what "better people" means. But we can more concretely discuss who is more valuable to the world to get home safely. (Although, as I said above, if there's going to be much argument over it, the people in the boat should be casting lots, not discussing that!)
(Remember, as Yudkowsky reminds us, when you see ambiguous terminology, the thing to do is usually to taboo/dissolve it and focus directly on the thing is actually relevant to your decision-making, not sit down to figure out exactly what this ambiguous terminology "means"! No sensible decisions can be made on this basis!)
> And in fact, if they were to make the case that their superior skills mean they should be favored to get a seat on the lifeboat, we would actually see that as a sign that they are in reality a worse person.
This is just playing around with terminology, or a form of equivocation really. We often say that someone is a "better person" or a "worse person" to mean that they're better/worse in some sense of, like, moral intention. But if the disparity is as great as I considered, then the biologist being a bit of a jerk isn't going to swing things. Being a "better person" in that sense, while relevant as an input, is not determinative. It only sounds like it might be because you're using the phrase "better person" to mean two differen things! The right thing to do here, again, is to eliminate the phrase and directly discuss what's relevant to decision-making.
I don't think it's really "playing around with terminology" or "equivocation" Sniff. I think it's actually getting at something important.
There are lots of ways that society rewards people like Lance: wealth, power, popularity, hot babes. etc. And while we may envy them, I think most of us consider that situation fair or at least not unreasonable.
But I don't think most of us would necessarily regard Lance as a "better person", in the sense of someone more deserving of a parachute in a crashing plane or (for believers) someone more likely to merit a place in heaven. Very different calculations go into that, which (to the extent that they can be defined) have to do with qualities like kindness, helpfulness, and making the most out of whatever circumstances we've been given.
And I'd suggest that one of those qualities that human beings consider important along this second dimension is the recognition of the distinction between these two kinds of measures of a person. Someone who believes that their superior intelligence/strength/speed/ability makes them a better person along the second dimension would actually be demonstrating themselves to be a worse person along that dimension.
FYI, I'd pick Mozart
I'd pick Mozart over me, but I'd not pick Mozart over anyone else.
In a lot of cases, scientific problems are worked on by multiple researchers, either together or independently, so there's a good chance that even if you remove the discoverer, someone else will come up with the same theory sooner or later. OTOH, if you removed Mozart, it's not like another composer would write Figaro instead, or at least not as Mozart would have written it.
Mozart vs. Salieri isn't the less convenient possible case for your view. Try Singer vs. Hitler.
I don't have a problem explicitly choosing Singer over Hitler. Or frankly pretty much anyone over Hitler. And the same goes for lots of people who have done far less evil.
I'm fine with (and would agree with) a society that decides there are anti-social acts whose consequences include the loss of a right to parachute.
What I'm arguing against is the idea that good qualities or accomplishments somehow make someone a better person or more worthy of the parachute. Or that someone's lesser qualities make them a lesser person or less worthy.
If I imagine two versions of me, one that was born without legs and one with, I would unhesitatingly choose to be the one with legs. And if this were detected in vitro, I wouldn't have a problem aborting the version of myself without.
But if these two versions of me were in a plane with only one parachute or a sinking ship with only spot on a lifeboat, I believe they should each get an equal shot.
I think the trick is that, if you say that some people are better than others, you support the bad word and are therefore a Nazi, whereas if you don't, then you fail to condemn Hitler enough and are therefore a Nazi.
There's a difference between saying someone is a worse person because of things they've chosen to do, and saying someone is a worse person because of innate abilities or genetic makeup. At least if you aren't a determinist, which most people aren't.
"if you've got a brilliant biologist vs, well, someone of no particular note, you pick the former"
This assumes that the world will be a better place with the biologist than with the ordinary person. And if we define "better" narrowly enough, like less disease or hunger or material deprivation, then on the margins, sure. But what if the brilliant biologist has almost no friends or family that love them, while the ordinary guy is a beloved member of an ordinary community, who brings lots of people joy? Or what if he's just totally normal guy that's supporting a wife and three kids and also trying to help his parents in their old age? There are other dimensions to "better" than what we can easily quantify in terms of material well-being.
I guess you could argue that this particular biologist is so brilliant that they and they alone will be capable of some profound discovery, like finding a way to cure all cancer or something. That seems like the great-man theory of history. It might be true in some limited circumstances but I don't think it's a good rule of thumb. If Einstein hadn't been born, I think someone else would have figured out relativity. Would it have taken significantly longer? I don't know, maybe? There is just *so* much uncertainty when you are trying to project out something like "total human value" over the course of an entire life and beyond, and I think we should be very humble in the face of that uncertainty.
> while the ordinary guy is a beloved member of an ordinary community, who brings lots of people joy? Or what if he's just totally normal guy that's supporting a wife and three kids and also trying to help his parents in their old age?
Atomization of modern society, falling real wages and rising cost of living means those aren't exactly "ordinary" traits. Somebody exceptionally virtuous but unskilled like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunga_Din might reasonably get priority over an expert chemist like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
I don't think Scott's right in the parachute case, at least not in a way that matters.
The third passenger on the plane is Alice, a dangerous terrorist who is holding a dead-man's switch that will nuke Paris if she dies. Are Scott and Lance now "inferior" to her?
I also have a gut sense that there's some sort of, I dunno, Heisenbergian uncertainty tied up in these scenarios. You can't actually measure "human dignity" without putting people in a situation that would require them to act inhumanely.
> I don't know anyone who believes in that scenario (or even the more likely scenario of limited space in the lifeboats) that the "superior" person should get priority
This is not as intuitive an idea as you think it is.
When I was a very small child, my parents were watching some disaster movie and at some point, "women and children first!" was called out.
I was genuinely confused by that and asked my parents why women and children were considered "special?" I was a small kid, I knew many other small kids, and I had perfect knowledge that none of us were special enough to warrant being prioritized over an adult as a matter of course.
My mom said something about protecting children and women and that it was "just the right thing to do" and I scoffed at her that it was a stupid idea. Kids aren't special. Women aren't special. Everyone is just people.
And I've never really let go of that intuition. If I had to make decisions in a disaster situation I wouldn't hesitate to allocate resources to the people most likely to survive (and depending on the disaster, be useful afterwards). I'd like to think my moral intuition about this is so strong I'd be willing to sacrifice myself in the moment and then regret it later.
I think the "Sophie's choice" criterion of "very clearly more likely to survive" is very, very different than "more valuable" and while key in actual reality, not what this thought experiment is about.
The reason for choosing children (apart from the wired in emotion) and women (similar reason -- breeders, if young enough) rather than drawing random lots is one that also has nothing to do with "worth", which is that they have more to lose, statistically speaking. IF the likelihood of survival is equal in our hypothetical than choosing a child or a young person is a no brainer because a dead child or 18 year old is a whole life unlived lost. A dead me, only maybe another 20 years of anything worth having (for me, not the world). The equation would change a bit if I was a "valuable" person in a utilitarian sense, but still not override the basic 20 vs 50+ differential.
In the lifeboat scenario you're assuming that all children are going to live a useful and productive lives, which is obviously not true. After all, every predator and criminal alive today was a child once, with their whole lives (of tormenting others) in front of them.
Given that there's no way to know if a particular child is going to be a benefit or a menace to others, my intuition remains that it's better to save the "sure thing" of an accomplished and useful adult rather than a blank-slate child.
No, I'm not assuming that. I'm taking a risk - accepting that some children will turn criminal, hoping none will turn Hitler - because I'm NOT making a choice on the "worthiness" basis. We don't differ on the numbers here, we differ on fundamental values. If I have a young offender and young Mozart, in principle I'm STILL drawing lots between them.
We've now drifted even further away from the disaster hypothetical but perhaps closer to Scott's original premise.
Are your fundamental values / intuitions about people informed by a religious tradition? If so, then we probably can't productively debate these ideas.
As a person who is fundamentally justice-based and doesn't value generic spiritual principles on any level, I can't conceive of the worldview and/or emotions which would permit a young offender to be selected at the expense of a non-offender, not even by chance. I mean, are you considering the offender's future victims? What if you could be certain that you or one of your loved ones is fated to be one of the offender's future victims? Would that foreknowledge change your determination to draw lots between an offender and a non-offender?
I'm an atheist, and grew up in an atheist family, but I think it's very difficult to avoid being influenced to some extent by broadly speaking spiritual notions of human "soul", or whatever one uses in place of that; ideas of not using humans as means, etc.
I think what's more significant is that I come from the part of the world fairly recently particularly marred by genocide (always run on the superiority/inferiority or "objectively harmful for the cause" grounds) so I'm very sensitive to potential consequences of adopting such ideas, when they can be imposed on others against their will (I accept personal sacrifice for the greater good, but it has to come from the potential victim).
As to future victims of the young offender. While it's more probable that more people will suffer, I don't know that. Maybe the experience of being saved despite being "undeserving" will change that person into a great benefactor. Maybe the Mozart will die 3 days after the rescue and the offender would get cleaned up and without becoming quite a saint would still live an ok life with his wife and kids. We DON'T KNOW.
I think if I KNEW that the offender would cause real severe harm to *some* others and the Mozart would not, it would change the calculation. But I will never know for sure so it's moot.
I think the only situation in which it would be preferable to act on probabilities would be harm of genocidal proportions. I do realise that I lack consistency here, but here we go. I'd make a choice against Hitler on probabilities.
I think this calculation depends on the baseline frequency of any person being a benefit vs menace as an adult. And the world has gotten better as population expands, because people tend to be more benefit than menace.
A society of accomplished adults and no children is nice while it lasts, and it isn't going to last long. For our ancestors, getting completely wiped out was a possibility, and that's where our moral instincts come from.
>an accomplished and useful adult
Why is this the assumption? If a random child is a blank slate then so is a random adult. Even if they were accomplished and useful before seeing people sacrifice a child to save them, there's no guarantee they'll be so on the other end.
Because the likelihood of an adult having life-ruining trauma and guilt for being saved over a (stranger's!) child is relatively low. If that adult has any kind of family obligations (caring for elderly parents, for their own children), then they're probably going to keep working rather than throw themselves off a bridge or whatever.
~80% of women gave birth, ~40% of men fathered children. Men are, relatively speaking, expendable. Women and children are also smaller, so you can save more of them with a lifeboat. I am, parenthetically, a guy, not a female supervillain.
This is all true, and I'm happy to buy it, but I don't think that's what's informing most people's intuitions and traditions about "women and children first."
Although - ha! - it occurs to me that conquering civilizations have traditionally had similar intuitions about "saving" the women and children it conquers. Maybe "women and children first" is far more about male expendability than the ephemeral value of women and children than we know.
Consider the German villages outside of Rome. They sent off their young males to war and most of them died; fierce warriors are meat on the table for disciplined soldiers. The village populations stayed pretty stable. If a Roman army walked past the village and... acquired... camp followers, the village died.
What do you think the alternative explanation is?
Sentimentality.
If the sentiments have an evolutionary purpose, that's not an alternative.
Not discussing worthiness angle, but generally woman and especially children have much lower survival rate in case of whatever disaster is happening - this is caused mostly by difference in physical strength and it was even worse when fashion for woman was mostly giant dresses.
So prioritising woman and children probably gave them *any* chance, rather than just increased them like it happened in case of the men. Also worth noting - woman and children first policy is a relatively new idea.
"Women and children (are prioritized to survive) first" isn't necessarily that new! It applies to disasters in modern times, but as discussed in another thread, it was often deliberately applied by conquerors during conquest. In that case, conquerors were often recognizing a real utility in keeping women (well, presumably fertile women) and children, but not men.
Yes, but there is a certain difference - as you mentioned, they are an asset after the war, but during shipwreck - they are a liability, as you get stuck in a tiny raft in the middle of the sea.
That's a weird use of "prioritized to survive". It'd be more accurate to say that out-group men were prioritized to be eliminated.
I didn't meant it literally, which is why I put it in a a parenthetical. I was more connecting the idea that (fertile) women and children tend to be prioritized by their conquerors and wanted to tie that phrase to "women and children first."
An alternate theory which I'm not sure is correct. If you value your culture (and most people seem to), then to a large extent it's transmitted by women, and it can only be carried into the future by children.
Children > Women >men has a very straightforward evopsych explanation -- woman and children allow the tribe to continue, men as defenders of the tribe are dispensible, and one man can impregnate multiple women anyway,
I think "women and children first" is a Shelling Point that try to ensure there will be no chaos and conflicts that get in the way of save someone. Something else could be Shelling Point and work just as good.
It's possible, of course, to track the motivations behind this particular Shelling Point, like "children have more expected life-years", "patriarchy establishes that men should be strong, brave and ready to sacrifice themselves". and some evolutionary reasons-of-reasons.
"Women and children first" is mostly a Hollywood fantasy anyway. It was the rule applied on the Titanic, and because that's the only shipwreck most people know about, people assume it's a general rule. But in most shipwrecks, grown men tend to be the first to be saved.
In most shipwrecks, there's a mostly male crew.
I agree this is a surprising norm. I would attribute it to men being stronger, both physically and (at least during the Titanic era) in terms of social power, and competing to show off their chivalry and the fact that they weren't going to seize the lifeboats by force. Compare to "the captain goes down with the ship" - the captain is the most powerful person, so as a concession to equality, he preemptively gives up his right to seize a lifeboat.
I always thought that was to do with the shame of losing a ship. The Italian guy who ran his ship aground, and escaped, ended up being punished severely.
We posted the same thought at the same time.
And consider how comparatively more valuable ships were in history, when insurance and diversified funds and etc weren't as much of a thing as they are today.
> competing to show off their chivalry
So why is chivalry admired? Did it pop up out of nowhere, or does it have an evopsych explanation?
In a tribal warfare or cooperative-hunting context, it's a patch for free-rider problems. To win the fight, you need enough guys in the shield wall. Anybody in the shield wall has a chance of dying even if their side wins. So, if somebody's confident that their side will win regardless, they'd be tempted to stay back at camp and let everyone else take those risks... but when too many do that, the undermanned shield wall collapses, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/
Huh, I always assumed "the captain goes down with his ship" as being more about ensuring the person with the most power is also the one most personally invested in avoiding the loss of a HUGE asset - the ship itself.
Or put another way, "the captain goes down with the ship" seems far more like "come back with your shield, or on it" than "women and children first."
I entirely agree -- saves me typing my own comment!
...but I HAVE encountered people who in the same thought experiment chose the "more valuable". I'm not sure about always actively choosing the more vulnerable (might get into Sophie's choice territory sometimes) but random lots seem the most ethically reasonable with the chosen having the option to swap/sacrifice.
"You have outthought yourself here." That one is going in the notebook, dude, fist bump.
The airplane is going to crash. There are 15 parachutes. The following people are present:
1. 3 mothers
2. 2 single women
3. 5 children, assorted genders
4. A world-class musician
5. A physics professor
6. A Nobel-laureate in literature
7. The plane's pilot
8. The plane's co-pilot
9. A convicted murderer who completed the sentence and is released
10. Someone scheduled to have a murder trial
11. A patient in drug-rehab
12. A current drug user not in rehab with no intention to change habits or go to rehab
13. An alcoholic that recognizes the problem but hasn't yet had a chance to try to change it
14. A celebrity news reporter everyone knows
What happens here? I don't know, and cannot definitively answer the question, so since it is only hypothetical anyway, I propose the 21 people end up fighting with each other over who gets the parachutes and the plane crashes with everyone aboard.
I'd guess the killers definitely get parachutes and then civilized rules reassert themselves and the mothers, then women and children, are saved, along with lots for remaining parachutes, if any. If the junkies are asleep maybe they don't get straws.
The practical answer that sidesteps the intent of the question is to share six of the parachutes. Parachutes have rated design loads that vary wildly, and you can get away with exceeding the load by a fair amount of you only need to use the parachute once and are willing to risk breaking a leg on landing. And tandem jumps are definitely possible provided you strap the two people together securely. Especially if you open the chute as soon as you're clear of the plane instead of at terminal velocity.
Then unless the physics professor suggests something like this, the professor ought not to get one.
Women and children first is based on the idea that they are superior.
1) Eggs are valuable and sperm is not.
2) Children have more remaining life years then adults.
Men are generally replaceable, especially ordinary men, which is who these ordinary rules are made for.
Anyway, the airplane example obviously exists. It's called embryo selection. You implant the Lance embryo.
Value and status are both multiple things.
> Children have more remaining life years then adults.
This isn't actually an advantage for them; an adult can produce children - or anything else - in the future more quickly than a child can.
Reproductive capacity of the group is diminished by the loss of women, but not by the loss of men. This explains why women would be saved first, but it doesn't do anything to explain why children would get any priority.
You might note that in cases where there isn't enough to go around between a parent and a child, the parent is saved and the child is exposed. That's because the parent is more valuable than the child.
There's an inherent problem with Scott's hypothetical with Lance. He added in that Lance is more helpful to others than himself, but that would imply Lance would make sure Scott got the parachute in this case. If Lance is a self-serving person who chooses to give himself the parachute because he's "the better person" then that removes one of the most important criteria in the decision. If Lance was a jerk, we would care a lot less that he's smart and rich.
If Scott's making the decision about who should get the parachute, and offers it to Lance (and then Lance takes it), he's actually saying that Lance is *not* as good about helping others.
The idea that you should value yourself less than some other guy seems to me as wrong as the idea that you should value yourself more. It just usually has no negative impact on society so we let it pass.
Society consistently values someone voluntarily deferring to the needs of others. I think it's because of the huge bias we have in favor of ourselves. If we're willing to concede to someone else, it means we didn't just value them highly, but enough to overcome that bias.
Without that bias I don't think society would care and would look at it neutrally as you say. But we do have a huge bias, and pretending that we can look at life-or-death situations neutrally isn't helpful or healthy, it just gives people the opportunity to overvalue themselves and fight more for what they want at the expense of others.
The trick is you hand Lance the parachute, and then shout "No Backsies" as you throw yourself out of the airplane.
Beautifully put. Also, the future is inscrutable so who knows which person will actually go on to do the most good. And another thing, it’s relatively easy to judge people based on particular attributes, choices or behaviours but to judge an entire person as better or worse than another without a gods-eye view is always bound to be partial and questionable.
I believe the superior person should get priority, and don't think there's even any doubt. In fact, like someone else points out, your example of women and children is also based on superiority!
Is value an objective fact? If it's a social construct, then people are of equal value when society says they are, which democratic societies tend to. You also have a notion of instrumental value , being good at things or valuable for things, that is more objective, but it's instrumental not terminal, so there is an element of talking-past in the debate.
And the reason that is done is because in a time-limited, high-stress environment you need to foster as much social cohesion as possible. You do so by 1) adhering strictly to cultural standards and 2) making everyone believe that there is a chance their preferences will be honored.
1) "Women and children" fits the US and probably Western cultural standard so you knock that out first to show empathy and concern.
2) "Draw lots" appeals to fairness and gives everyone a chance.
3) "People with skills needed to survive" is actually likely harder to get through because you need to communicate that this is a necessity, and communicate that your picked lifeboat pilot is indeed the most/only capable candidate. In fact you almost definitely need to lead off with explaining that your plan honors 1 and 2 to buy yourself the social credit needed to advance your candidates for 3.
But crisis leadership / realpolitik is not the same as morality. (I guess in a consequentialist viewpoint, the leader that saves a handful of random lives is more moral than the one that caused a mutiny, chaos, and death.) This is why for these kind of scenarios you have to kind of assume this is the slowest crash/sinking that has ever existed and an orderly discussion can occur over possibly a several week period with a figure who has autocratic control making the decision and an honor guard that prevents violence. I tend to prefer "spaceship evacuating a dying planet" or "bunker before the asteroid hits" scenario for a general framework, but even then there's a lot of political considerations that need to occur before you can get to the moral ones.
Reminds me of the later Wittgenstein. We can simply choose not to play the "inferiority" language game. This applies to so many other seemingly intractable debates as well.
Are abortions really about what is life? Stop playing the game of trying to define life and focus instead on "is our society better off if we agree to allow abortions before N weeks". That's one example.
Through this prism it's easy to see how many controversies and debates essentially boil down to metaphysical arguments, and are thus meaningless according to LW. Our brains get tricked into thinking something makes sense because language is like that. There are no clear edges to where things stop making sense. We actually revel in this fact and celebrate it - poetry, for example. No wonder we then waste years of our lives studying philosophy (best case) or being extremely mad about moral/political hot topics our entire lives (worse case).
Then we must answer the question of whether the fetus is part of society…
Au contraire. That's just reducing the argument to a different language game. You pivot from life to "part of society" or "worthy of moral consideration", but that gets you nowhere. Everyone can just re-orient their positions to argue their values around the new framing of the question. Arguing over "what is society" or "what is morality" or "what is personhood" is not less pointless than arguing over "what is life". The only move is to discuss things pragmatically based on what decisions we have to make and what their outcomes might be. If you find yourself resorting to words like "death", "evil", etc you've once again fallen off the track and are back in metaphysics land.
The problem is that metaphysics matters. Imagine there's two black boxes. Both of them have a receptacle for raw materials and dispense finished goods. One of them is a fully automated robotic factory. The other is full of slaves working under horrible conditions. From the point of view of someone outside the black box, they seem completely identical. And yet, there's one that's okay to use and one that's not.
Are slaves raw materials that get put in the box? Can the slaves leave the box?
Slaves can't leave the box. Maybe they were in the box so long that everyone forgot about them. Or maybe the box grew them from test tubes. Basically, stick to the least convenient possible world: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/neQ7eXuaXpiYw7SBy/the-least-convenient-possible-world
This is nonsense, and of course you know it. If you are going to act for the good of society, you must know what the society that you are acting on behalf of is and what good is your end.
Scott already brought up Nazis, so let’s take that as a clear example- they of course did not count the Jews (and the Slavs, etc) as members of society.
Or, even if they did consider them part of society, they may have still thought that society on the whole would be better off without the Jewish or Slavic parts.
"Is our society better off if...?" seems to me to be ends-justify-the-means style thinking, with all the awful consequences that might follow.
I don't think the ends justify the means. I don't *necessarily* think the means justify the ends, either. You have to approach these questions holistically.
> "Is our society better off if...?" seems to me to be ends-justify-the-means style thinking, with all the awful consequences that might follow.
I don't know if I agree with that. For example, is our society better off if we remove drunk drivers by any means necessary? Sure that would be terrible for drunk drivers. But what about the people they kill? Seems like there's a big status quo biais in accepting the state of society with murderers, rapists, etc.
I agree with this. The use of ”superior/inferior” in these debates is reminiscent of the use of ”greatness” in the ontological argument. If you introduce some vague measure of goodness without rigorously defining it, you can get a lot of rhetorical mileage out of it, but you’re not going anywhere in particular.
"Are abortions really about what is life?"
Yes. Or more precisely, about what is sentient. Or even more precisely, about what has a right to continue existing.
"is our society better off if we agree to allow abortions before N weeks"
That depends. Are the fetuses we're deciding to abort part of "our society"? We can all agree that your right to swing your fist ends where the other man's nose begins. But it's not helpful if we can't agree on what constitutes another man.
For what it's worth, I'm not pro-life, but I am vegetarian, which is the same fundamental disagreement.
> Yes. Or more precisely, about what is sentient. Or even more precisely, about what has a right to continue existing.
Steelman: even with the most extreme assumption of life beginning at fertilization, there is still a debate to be had. This is because it is actually about who can and cannot be forced to donate organs by law against their will.
It may be morally right for me to donate blood and/or a kidney to save a life, but the law will not force me to do so. I have body autonomy, and other people's rights start only where that ends.
It may be morally right for parts of my corpse to be used to save lives after I die, but even in opt-out legislations the law gives me a way to ensure this does not happen. My /corpse/ has body autonomy. People might disagree with my decisions, but they cannot prevent them.
Only when it comes to pregnant women, and this class of people alone, does the law require the woman to donate part of her body to preserve, however debatably, another life, regardless of her will.
Once the child is born, we stop caring about this class of actions once more: although responsible for the child in all manner of other ways, the mother is no longer required by law to donate so much as a fingernail against her will to save its life should the matter arise.
People may claim it's about saving life, but unless they are also arguing for loss of body autonomy in all these other scenarios, it is actually about forced pregnancy.
> People may claim it's about saving life, but unless they are also arguing for loss of body autonomy in all these other scenarios, it is actually about forced pregnancy.
Satisfying.
The comment you're replying to is an example of what you asked for here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-322/comment/52672291 .
If the logic of the comment I commented on was upsetting to you - people shouldn't be forced to give up their kidneys or part of their livers to living, sentient strangers, so they shouldn't be forced to give up gestation services to living strangers, either - then what do you think about my final reply to you?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-322/comment/52918603
Well...I find that argument highly disturbing. I definitely don't agree with it, and it seems to have some obvious holes (e.g. adoption is an option, especially when in most western countries couples wanting to adopt exceed children who need adopting).
On the other hand, it looks like a principled utilitarian argument that is worth discussing and analysing, even if it's disturbing. It's similar to "triage" arguments about killing people in overpopulated poor countries being the humane way to reduce poverty.
Compare the argument Throwaway1234 is making, which seems like one from pure selfishness. Unless they are *only* talking about the role of the law and not about morality at all (and my request for clarification about that below was not addressed), this kind of "I don't owe you anything" cold selfishness I find sickening even if said to a starving or sick child whose suffering you have no responsibility for. To say it about a child (the existence of a fully sentient child was explicitly assumed, which is the only reason I'm reacting like this) who you are directly responsible for the existence of by your own choices is beyond sickening. To say in a premeditated way, not from a position of fear or desperation while actually being undesirably pregnant, that you would not only have this attitude if you were, but that you would consciously act in a way that may bring this situation about and see nothing wrong with it (i.e. you are actively defending the right to have sex, consciously planning to simply abort any child that results, while accepting the child as fully sentient) is beyond *that*.
Tl; dr your argument is a utilitarian moral argument (that I think illustrates some major problems with utilitarianism, but reasonable people can disagree). An argument strictly about abortion being beyond the legitimate power of the law to regulate (while maintaining it would be horrifically evil to actually do) is a libertarian moral argument (as long as it's applied consistently to things like vaccine mandates and free speech). An argument that it's perfectly fine to consciously create a sentient child and then kill them for a selfish reason, on the other hand, is sociopathically amoral.
I may have missed something, but that's how this thread looks to me.
Given the premise - "the extreme assumption of life beginning at fertilization" - those organ-donation scenarios aren't useful analogues. They omit a crucial dimension of legal and ethical reasoning, about the degree of responsibility the actors have for each other's condition.
Instead we ought to ask how the law would respect my bodily integrity if I somehow induced another party to become dependent on my kidneys.
(Obviously, this analogy would not cover all pregnancies.)
All law restricts bodily autonomy.
+1 internet point for you.
"it is actually about forced pregnancy"
Only if the sex was non-consensual, which is why a lot of pro-life people make an exception for rape.
...the spectrum of possibilities here also includes many things like failed birth control. One only has the blunt instrument of law to work with, however; hence the suggestion that the decision should be between a woman and her doctor, and the law has no place in it.
Meanwhile, if you are arguing for someone to remain pregnant and give birth when this is not their choice, you are arguing for forced pregnancy; if you don't like being called a duck, it may be worth reconsidering the quacking and the waddling. (The same, incidentally, goes for various "journalists tricking you into saying quotable things" scenarios).
Failed birth control is still an example of consensual sex. Sex between fertile humans always comes with the possibility of pregnancy. If one is not willing to accept the consequences, however remote they may be, then don't have sex, or make yourself infertile. And for the record, I hold men to the same standard, insofar as biology allows.
> or make yourself infertile
...such as by using birth control. The more "permanent" methods are also not perfect.
There are also the cases we are now seeing in the abortion ban states such as women forced to carry to term pregnancies that will not result in a living child and/or may endanger the woman's life. The list of exceptional situations grows, but the law is a blunt instrument that has no room for nuance or discretion, especially when the lawmakers are not willing to explicitly state the actual intent: pregnancy is the punishment for consensual sex.
Consensual sex is not the same thing as a desire to become pregnant. Meanwhile, the answer to "eating comes with a risk of food poisoning" is neither "then starve" nor "you chose the risk, you deserve the food poisoning so you can't get medical treatment"
Forced pregnancy. This line of argument is so dishonest and is a jumbo-sized motte-and-bailey.
You claim it's forced pregnancy. When it's pointed out that you can avoid pregnancy by not having sex*, you pivot to "punishing women for having sex". Truly unbelievable.
Imagine an egalitarian agrarian society where everyone can work on the harvest as much or as little as they want, and get a share of the grain in proportion to the amount of work they did. Everyone's treated the same and there's no coercion at all.
Then I complain "it's not fair, I don't want to work, you're forcing me to work that's slavery". When it's pointed out that I'm free to do no work and just not get any grain, I say "oh so you want me to starve, you are literally forcing me to starve". When it's pointed out that, no, if I'm lucky enough to find food elsewhere then all good, but if the harvested grain is what I want then all I need to do is put in some work on the harvest. "Oh, so you're forcing me to work, you're *punishing* me for not working". Round and round forever, and then I use this is as justification for killing another farmer and stealing their food.
No. I'm not being forced to work: if not working is so important to me, I can do so and accept less (reliable) food. I'm not being denied food: if getting a share of the grain is important to me, I can do some work on the farm. The one thing I'm being denied is *getting everything I want*, no matter the effect on others.**
If you're a woman who reallly doesn't want to get pregnant, you're not being forced to, you can simpy not have sex. If you really want to have sex, that's fine, just accept the risk of pregnancy if you're not lucky enough to avoid it. The one thing you are denied is getting everything you want by killing those who stand in your way.
I'd say grow up, but this would be an insult to children, who may be immature but are hardly ever this sociopathically, murderously selfish.
(*of course we're assuming exceptions for rape which everyone in this thread has endorsed. Raising that objection is another massive motte-and-bailey since you clearly really support it on demand)
(**never mind that back-breaking farm work is whole lot more of a burden than simply abstaining from sex. And never mind that going through a pregnancy is, except in a small minority of abortion-seeking cases, not remotely like starving to death).
Those who want to outlaw abortions are arguing for forced pregnancy in exactly the same way those who want abortions to be legal are arguing for killing babies. This is exactly why the issue is hard--the only way we know to avoid forcing a woman to carry a baby to term in her body is to let her kill the baby using some drugs or medical procedure. Approximately everyone agrees that both killing babies and forcing women to carry babies in their bodies is bad. We are stuck trying to work out what tradeoff between these two bad things is best.
Wow. I just...I guess I appreciate the honesty. It makes things clearer.
You see, I get so, so disturbed by the way pro-choicers typically talk, all this talk of choice and rights and not a *single word* about the fetus. Not a single sentence in a whole pro-choice screed that *of course* all this rights-reasoning *only* applies because the fetus is not sentient, and would *of course* be completely void if evidence arose that fetuses are conscious after all. And I think to myself, okay, maybe they are just taking this for granted. That even though it *sounds* like they're saying the fetus, even if sentient, is utterly irrelevant to them and they think only of themselves and are completely unconcerned with the infliction of pain and death on a sentient human child as long as they get what they want...their whole argument really does rest on the assumption of a total lack of sentience, even though they don't say it. That they don't think they need to explicitly clarify that they're not monsters.
And then, every now and then, comes someone like you making it crystal clear that no, my attempt at good-faith was misplaced, and many pro-choicers really are monstrously selfish on an unimaginable scale.
Now, *maybe* you want to say you're merely making a technical argument about the limits of the law, and aren't making any moral claim about actually getting an abortion at all. I don't believe it. Anyone who really is only arguing for a limit on the scope of the law would make it very clear that, if a fetus is indeed fully sentient, an abortion would be an act of unimaginably horrific evil, something that they would never ever do, or in any way support or enable, and that they would ostracise anyone who did get an abortion for anything less than an extremely compelling reason, even if they don't think it should technically be *illegal*. Funnily, I have basically never seen that said.
Compare free-speech-for-nazis absolutists, who are usually pretty clearly explict about nazis being horrible, evil people who they would never support or be friends with, even though they don't think it should be banned. The kind of speech libertarian who doesn't seem to see any problem with nazism at all would raise huge red flags, and verbal nazism is about a billion times less evil than deliberately killing a sentient child for a minor selfish reason.
I don't want to believe that people like you are sociopathic monsters. But unless you *did* mean to say that, given the "extreme assumption of life beginning at fertilization" abortion would be an act of horrific evil (in which case I applogise for calling you monstrous, but I'm baffled why you didn't make that explicit) then that's the only reading possible.
A person with anything resembling a conscience who thinks that a fetus is sentient would find the idea of an abortion (for a less-than-utterly-compelling reason) absolutely inconceivable.
There are fully sentinent children dying right now who are a match for your body parts. Not donating everything you can is an act of monstrous evil and selfishness. We need laws to make you donate blood and spare organs to save the dying children.
Yes, that's a fair argument and a discussion that needs to be had.
1. Saying "many people agree that this act X I might do is murderous and evil, but other acts that they do and think nothing of are actually just as murderous; therefore those should also be banned" is an entirely principled and compassionate argument. Saying the same but ending with "therefore, *I* should be free to commit murderous acts as well" is...so evil, so disgustingly and sociopathically selfish, that yes I can't think of an appropriate term for such a person other than "monster". I'm not saying you are saying the latter, but it certainly *looks* like you are, and my request for clarification that you're not was not answered so I don't know what else to conclude.
2. If you ARE arguing the former, then I have no problem with your position at all beyond practical details. Yes, refusing to donate an organ that you don't at all need (i.e. you wouldn't suffer health problems without it) to a person (let alone a child) who would die without it, and where you are the only person who can save them, for a trivial selfish reason like "I was hoping to get a promotion next month" or whatever the equivalent is to "I just want to have a lot of sex", would be monstrously selfish. And equivalent to the reasons for many or most abortions. (Doing so on the grounds that a disabled child should not live would be even more evil, and this literally describes one of the common, and *celebrated*, reasons for abortion).
I am sceptical that this describes many instances of organ-refusal; I think most people who refuse are either not convinced that giving up their organs won't harm them badly or kill them, have beliefs about being spritually harmed by doing so (especially in after-death donation) or are terrified of being subject to a medical procedure without their consent, without having done *anything* of their own to require it or justify it. I definitely support a right to refuse in these cases, just as I support exceptions for abortion for rape and serious health reasons. (Even though there are *still* a lot of differences between the two cases).
But if someone is terrified of having to go through a pregnancy, or believes that any pregnancy would harm them horribly, then they of course would not engage in a recreational act that has a high chance of causing pregnancy. (E.g. people who are terrifed or traumatised of drowning often don't even want to go near a boat that's on land!). If they do do that, then they are clearly *not* so terrified: if they then demand an abortion they are nothing but *entitled*, demanding to get everything they want regardless of the harms inflicted on another innocent being. (This doesn't apply to those are 100% convinced that a fetus posseses no sentience or consciousness whatsoever, and whose support for abortion rests *solely* on that; it's only those who think that isn't important who are entitled monsters).
> Yes, refusing to donate an organ that you don't at all need (i.e. you wouldn't suffer health problems without it) to a person (let alone a child) who would die without it, and where you are the only person who can save them, for a trivial selfish reason like "I was hoping to get a promotion next month" or whatever the equivalent is to "I just want to have a lot of sex", would be monstrously selfish. And equivalent to the reasons for many or most abortions.
Yes, this is pretty much the entire thing that triggered this whole subthread. I think at this point we are on almost exactly the same page. I completely agree the organ donation scenario described is monstrously selfish. And yet our laws permit it - our society consensus is that we may condemn that choice, but we do not forcibly prevent it being made; it is only pregnant girls that get the special treatment, and only while they are pregnant. Opinion in this specific space is incredibly strong and divisive; but only in this space. The moment the birth is registered, we're back in the "monstrous, selfish, but legally permitted" category when it comes to donating organs, even though the girl remains just as responsible for the baby's existence as she was a few seconds earlier. We have some laws about responsibility and negligence but these stop short of claims on the girl's body. She is not even required to breast feed - formula or a wet nurse or whatever is fine. Her life may be shot - no university for you, you're a full time nurse now! - her future may be ashes - but her body is once more inviolate. We have giant flaming arguments about abortion, but all the heat evaporates when it comes to organ donation; most people simply don't care much about saving lives that way.
Once we are at this point, then, consider that the law is a blunt instrument generally unable to deal with exceptional situations where a reasonable person might conclude that the law should not be applied, leading to kafkaesque outcomes such as teenage kids forced to give birth to their rapists' babies. Given that we seem to agree that there is no shortage of such situations - rapes, foetuses missing organs critical to life, foetuses endangering the mother by implanting in places other than the womb, etc etc - and also that in every other case but pregnancy, whatever we may ourselves think about the morality of the decision, we do in fact leave it up to the person and their doctor - I suggest we should do the same here.
In general I am in favour of fewer explicit laws governing human behaviour, especially in controversial situations where there is nuance and exceptions to be taken into account. For many laws in place and being considered, I do not believe we can sanely include enough exceptions to deal with the real world consequences of consistently enforcing them - reality is much better at coming up with terrible situations to put people in than people are at thinking of them ahead of time.
So when we single out one part of human experience and argue for laws that will end up forcing small groups of people into terrible situations when we don't feel particularly strongly about comparable cases that impact people more like us... I argue against such laws.
Hey, based on when you posted your comments, it looks like you never read my reply to you on Open Thread #322 until a couple of hours ago, but now that you have, please feel free to stop claiming that you've never seen a pro-choice advocate consider the well-being of the fetus/child.
I have, and I firmly consider (voluntary) abortion to be a lesser form of mercy-killing. Every abortion, every time. Any woman who is conflicted about having an abortion - wants a baby, but knows she can't adequately nurture it - and then has an abortion, has very literally committed an act of noble self-denial.
And every woman who has an abortion merely because pregnancy and parenthood would be inconvenient has (unwittingly) saved a child from a monster.
Please feel free to link to my argument for abortion as a means of preventing suffering:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-322/comment/52918603
"Hey, based on when you posted your comments, it looks like you never read my reply to you on Open Thread #322 until a couple of hours ago,"
I don't understand why you think that. I read your linked reply back then, and I wasn't sure how to respond to you raising a whole additional argument for abortion based not on sentience but still utilitarian and non-selfish. And the main thing I took from that comment was you describing my position as oddly emotional, which I admit it kind of is, and explaining the extent to which I still think it has a rational element (to the extent it's not already obvious) is not easy and would take a lot of thought on how to explain. So I let you have the last word there.
"please feel free to stop claiming that you've never seen a pro-choice advocate consider the well-being of the fetus/child."
I...don't *think* I ever said that. If I did appear to say that, it definitely wasn't intentional. Any utilitarian pro-choicer, for instance, is typically focused entirely on the well-being (or lack of being) of the fetus/child. I have some problems with utilitarians, but they are head-and-shoulders above most others when it comes to this.
What I've been saying is that *most* pro-choicers I've seen are not utilitarian and do not seem to mention or care about the fetus *at all*, given that they talk of *nothing* other than their own rights.
You are not an example of that (which I explicitly said in the linked thread further up) and neither is a utilitarian like Scott.
I've just now looked back over our conversation and you indeed were referring to a slightly different subset of pro-choicers than "all of them:" When I commented, I was in particular recalling this part:
(https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-322/comment/52717410)
> "Reading through pro-choice news articles and editorials, press releases from pro-choice groups, and statements from politicians, I'm waiting, and waiting and waiting, for them to just *mention*, just once, the presence of what many claim is a human child. And it's almost never mentioned or acknowledged at all."
I'm not a politician or professionally writing on the topic or representing a pro-choice group, but I believe I *am* expressing several views that most of them have but which are not strategically wise to say out loud.
Firstly and most importantly, advocating that abortion is a non-issue due to a fetus's lack of sentience invites philosophical and religious debates about sentience, the human soul, the value of human life, etc., etc. If people hold faith-based sentimental views about fetuses actually being precious children...
((...then those people should be really pissed at God for aborting about half of them (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2175534-women-have-more-miscarriages-than-live-births-over-their-lifetime/).
Ahem. I can never resist pointing out that if God exists, he is an abortionist of truly epic scale. Partly because it's funny, but mostly to bring visibility to the fact that *spontaneous abortion is an incredibly normal part of human life.* It's so, so, so normal! Induced abortion is just a drop in the bucket compared to all abortion, which is another reason to consider abortion in general a non-issue.)
...only emotional arguments about bodily autonomy are really going to have much of an impact.
Advocating that abortion prevents poverty and crime invites arguments about eugenics and the possibility of being called a Nazi. Etc.
Thus most pro-choice people choose stay on the much firmer ground of bodily autonomy, which pretty much everyone firmly agrees is good (except for the people who don't think women should have it during pregnancy), makes strategic sense. As Throwaway1234 has pointed out in many comments, "bodily autonomy except when pregnant" is a totally irrational and unfair double standard, so interrogating *only* that angle is a stronger position for most pro-choice folk than my unapologetic utilitarian position.
But I think it makes sense to assume that visible pro-choice folk share my position that abortion is a non-issue due to a lack of fetal sentience, and that most of them are probably somewhere along my spectrum of it being beneficial to both the pregnant woman and the (non-sentient, it can't be emphasized enough) fetus.
I hugely respect the discipline with how you've argued here, and to be candid, I am still so curious about why you care this much about this particular topic! Without going back over everything you've written across two different threads, my general impression was that you agree it's irrational to believe that fetuses have sentience, right?
That makes it a massive non-issue for me, so I'm surprised that your position over time has switched from pro-choice to pro-life (apparently mostly) due to the way pro-choicers argue their position. Why care if they don't care about the well-being of the "child?" *You* know there's no "child" in the true meaning of that word, so why is it so upsetting when they (almost certainly strategically) avoid mentioning said "child?"
I think there is a difference between a stranger needing a kidney and most pregnancies, in that in most pregnancies the woman plays an important role. I don't know how to estimate this, but 30% to 70% for ~70% of pregnancies sounds reasonable to me (but anyone is welcome to argue the numbers, it's what good about numbers, you can argue about them and move them). In that case, I think it's reasonable to expect a woman to take more responsibility for that act than for a stranger dying because their kidneys don't work.
There is a big imbalance in that again in most pregnancies a man is responsible too for it (I think in most and not all? But that "most" may be higher than the "most" for women) and can't lend his body to the baby like a woman can. I don't really know how law works when there is a physical difference like that and what is "fair" or good for a society in that case.
We're not talking about most pregnant women when we talk about abortion. Most pregnant women don't, thankfully, want an abortion. It is (almost) invariably an incredibly hard decision and does not come from a good situation. At the point when abortion is being considered, things have already gone terribly wrong. It is amazingly callous to presume that the decision comes on a whim due to lack of responsibility.
The woman is already in a place where the thing inside her is more like a stranger - e.g. where there was coercion, perhaps - or maybe a tumour - e.g. where it is known the child will not be viable or there are other medical problems with carrying it to term.
Being forced to donate their organs to a stranger against their will is not a bad analogy at all for what is going on to a great many women (and, tragically, underage girls) in a bunch of US states right now. In many cases it is more charitable than what is actually happening (consider e.g. the case of the women forced to carry anencephalic babies to term).
When you start arguing about responsibility, meanwhile, you are supporting my initial point: the debate isn't actually about the child any more. It's now about who deserves to be forced to carry it and who does not.
I've found a few surveys about reasons for abortions:
- https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2005/reasons-us-women-have-abortions-quantitative-and-qualitative-perspectives
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3729671/
- https://lozierinstitute.org/fact-sheet-reasons-for-abortion/
I don't know how representative they are, but they suggest that most common reason is financial, although I'd like to highlight that there are often multiple reasons, the surveys may not have all reasons listed and some reasons might be less hard to share than others.
I think the debate is still about the child because the idea here is to try to find a reasonable common ground where women are not forced to carry anencephalic babies to term while also reducing abortions. For example, if financial issues are so common, maybe financial aid could do something (new EA cause just dropped?).
I suspect free contraception, sex education, and perhaps even free vasectomies are actually the mosquito-net equivalents in this space.
Once you find yourself debating whether a woman's request for an abortion is worthy or whether she should have to carry to term, it is already too late - there is no good outcome to be had.
"It is amazingly callous to presume that the decision comes on a whim due to lack of responsibility."
The only charitable assumption is that you have never read anything a feminist has ever written on this topic. Feminists (and most pro-choicers generally, but especially them) are absolutely crystal clear that they support abortion for any reason whatsoever...or for none at all. Reasons like "to be sexually liberated" are explicitly endorsed, even celebrated, as valid reasons for abortion.
Do you know that laws prohibiting abortion only for the specific reason of *sex-selecting babies* (!) have been ruled unconstitutional by some US courts?
Do you know that abortion is frequently listed in progressive sex ed materials alongside condoms and pills as a valid form of *contraception*???
I generally agree with this argument, but it is muddied by the fact that the woman has some responsibility for the situation, by taking a course of action a reasonable person would have known would lead to pregnancy. The same moral reasoning is used to force the father to be financially responsible for the child - not exactly the same but I feel the calculus is much more similar than people currently are willing to admit.
...sure - except when the woman didn't actually choose that course of action, but got the effect anyway; failed birth control, lack of consent etc. The thing to notice here is that we are no longer talking about the foetus or what its potential future may be like - we are now talking about which women did something to deserve to be forced to carry to term and which did not (or did and have extenuating circumstances such as medical issues).
<i>Steelman: even with the most extreme assumption of life beginning at fertilization, there is still a debate to be had. This is because it is actually about who can and cannot be forced to donate organs by law against their will.</i>
If you're already pregnant, you've already donated your organs. The issue is whether you should be able to take them back at the cost of killing the person you donated them to.
I think it makes more sense to allow you to take back donated organs in your example than to allow abortion assuming fetuses are people. We can all agree that living longer is better than living shorter, so donating and taking back the organs is still better than not donating in the first place. But if you consider death inherently bad, living for a short time and then dying is worse.
> This is because it is actually about who can and cannot be forced to donate organs by law against their will.
There's a lot of major differences. The biggest one is responsibility. Nothing I did has any effect on you needing a kidney. But outside of rape, you can only get pregnant by your own actions. It's sort of like how if you see someone drowning in a river, you're legally allowed to just let them drown. But if you pushed them in, then if you let them drown it's murder.
Also, consider Kant's categorical imperative. Imagine a world where it's commonplace to have kids and then kill them/let them die, where there's a significant chance you'll die as a baby, vs one where you're not allowed to do that and, if you take risks that you know could result in you carrying a baby, you have to carry it to term. Clearly, being forced to choose between abstinence and risking being forced to carry a child isn't as bad as being killed.
Here's a better analogy.
Imagine you shoot someone in the kidney. They'll die unless they get a replacement. Also, the two of you share some very rare medical thing that means they can only survive if they can get your kidney specifically. In that case, should you be forced to give them your kidney? For example, could someone decide to charge you with murder, but only if that person dies, so if you don't give them a kidney you get punished?
Edit: This is also just something where people aren't always consistent. You gave an example where people decided not to switch the trolley, but there's also ones where they nearly universally do. Imagine someone thinks that, if it's beyond all reasonable doubt that a person is a murderer, they should lock that person up. Sure a system that does this will occasionally imprison innocent people, but if we have to imprison an innocent person to stop twenty or so murderers, it's still okay to do that. If there's someone who believes that, but that someone can't be forced to be pregnant for nine months to prevent a death, does that mean they're just claiming it's about bodily autonomy, but actually it's just about killing babies?
>Only when it comes to pregnant women, and this class of people _alone_, does the law require the woman to donate part of her body to preserve, however debatably, another life, regardless of her will.
[emphasis added]
_Almost_ agreed. DNA samples can be compelled. https://communitylaw.org.nz/community-law-manual/test/dna-samples-when-you-have-to-give-a-sample/
Of course, this is _vastly_ less invasive than forced pregnancy, and the objective of the DNA sample is to aid the legal system, not to preserve a life (though if it results in a murderer being confined where they cannot commit additional murders, it might have that effect ).
I hadn't previously noticed that Ludwig Wittgenstein has the same initials as Less Wrong.
Hell yeah Wittgenstein!
Language is just a game & inferior is a bad move to play, it’s only meaning is as a move in a game so if it’s a bad move just don’t play it, simple as.
More people should study Wittgenstein, though I always thought AGI would emerge from a Wittgenstein-inspired GAN so maybe I’m wrong on that
+ 1 internet point for Wittgenstein
>Stop playing the game of trying to define life and focus instead on "is our society better off if we agree to allow abortions before N weeks".
Likewise, stop playing the game of trying to define human rights and focus instead on "is our society better off if we just execute all the homeless people." So much easier!
Well, it seems like you think this is somehow a counter argument but you're proving my point very well. What would a society be like if it decided to execute homeless people? It would be a very scary place to live in, so maybe let's not execute homeless people?
See how easy that was? No need for metaphysics.
Sounds like a much less scary place to live in: homeless people scare me all the time, I almost got mugged by one. It is not obvious that society would be "Scarier" if we rounded up the bums and executed them. They aren't exactly productive members of society.
Now I'm opposed to executing the homeless, because I play "language games" that include them being human beings, with rights and inherit dignity, and whose life is sacred.
Clearly you’re not trying to argue honestly. So I’m not my sure replying isn’t a complete waste of time, but I’ll try for the sake of other readers.
Deciding on moral issues only requires weighing the implications very carefully. There’s no need to resort to metaphysics because that just leads to dead ends when people’s intuitions don’t match. Executing poor people is clearly a policy that leads to a terrifying society. The precedent is dangerous and the criterion doesn’t match anyone’s moral intuition in a rawlsian sense. That’s why you don’t actually believe in executing poor people - not because some abstract definition of a word like “society” leads you to the conclusion deductively.
And in case you do actually believe it’s better to live in a society that arbitrarily executes people for the greater good, because you’re unable to follow logically the implication of such an arrangement, then you’re free be on the pro-execution side, and no one will sway you to the other side by telling you that God says you’re wrong or that the definition of the word “justice” proves you’re on the wrong side. Morality, in the absence of metaphysics, boils down to compromises between people with different value systems. Or war.
I am very much trying to argue honestly, and I don't believe it's better to live in a society that arbitrarily executes people *because* of my metaphysical beliefs. You can't excise the metaphysics and have a meaningful discussion about this, is my point. You saying that it's "clearly a policy that leads to a terrifying society" is just the same as my saying "human beings are made in the image of God and sacred" and claiming that one is metaphysical while the other is "only weighing the implications very carefully" is a false distinction, as the only way to weigh the implications is to bring metaphysical questions into it.
You really need to study Wittgenstein. If you can't see a difference between "executing people is scary" and "humans are sacred because of God" then you have a ways to go.
But now you have to define "scary", so you've kicked the can down the road again.
I most certainly do not. Again, Wittgenstein. You are the one still playing the essentialist language game. I’m just expressing a preference not to live in a society that executes people for being poor. And I’m not doing it out of any semantic argument over the meaning of any word. That’s the point. The values don’t emerge from the semantics. The semantics evolve over time to vaguely match the values, but there’s never a perfect match. The whole idea of words mirroring abstract concepts or pointing to them is the conception of early linguistic philosophy that the later LE demolished.
>I’m just expressing a preference
Well if that's all you want to do, then all well and good, but most people who bring up the subject of abortion don't just want to express an opinion, they want to make a point someone else might agree with, which means defining your terms.
But it's clearly not all you want to do, because the second FLWAB says they disagree with your conclusion you come back to claim they're lying and of course they must think it's scary, after all that's what you think. It's "clearly a policy that leads to a terrifying society", as opposed to the society that tolerates camps of drug addicts with nothing to lose. Then you talk about how useless it is to define "justice", when nobody said "justice" and both of us clearly said "human rights". You haven't weighed the implications carefully; you can't even follow the text.
You're not avoiding the game, you're just bad at it.
I kind of think our society would be better (at least at first level utilitarian analysis) if we withheld much of the ruinously expensive end of life care we provide now, and simply euthanize people who are too expensive to keep alive. But I'm pretty sure it simply is untenable because of the pesky reality that these are "living people"
I think we should allow more people to make their own end of life decisions. We have a right to life, and the state should absolutely defend that to the hilt; but faced with terminal decline, I fail to see that we should have an obligation to life, at least as far as far as the state is concerned.
I think making your aim "the good of society" leads to some pretty obvious risks. What if there's a terminally ill child with a high probability of dying, so that the overall expected value of their life is negative? What about a repeat criminal? What about someone too old to contribute to society?
What does society even mean? The nation-state? The race? Does the category of society also include foreigners, animals, nature, and people of future generations, or does it only include currently existing human citizens? I don't know if words like "good" or "society" are any easier to define than "life."
"Stop playing the game of trying to define life and focus instead on..."
No, all you do is suggest we try to play another game, without even trying to argue what was wrong with the previous one and why is yours better.
[I'm not even against abortions]
"Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation."
Scott, you are a utilitarian to whom this seems reasonable. You fit in the lizardman constant with respect to this.
Unless you're going to define away "reasonable person", I'd say that ignoring the lizardman constant, no reasonable person would preferentially give the parachute to Lance (though they might pick randomly and give it to him a rate of 50 percent). The fact that you think otherwise is because you're in a deeply weird bubble, just as when you said that marriage vows don't mean anything.
Also: Scott has young children! If Lance doesn’t have kids (it isn’t mentioned whether he does or not) I think almost anyone would give *Scott* the parachute in that situation.
Well, unless they work for the NYT.
Even if they didn't, you could probably find someone to claim that privileges people who have kids and devalues childfree people.
Seriously, I think most people would bop the other person over the head and take the parachute for themselves, then lie about it to rescuers. Who's going to notice more injuries on what's left of the other person after the crash?
> Seriously, I think most people would bop the other person over the head and take the parachute for themselves, then lie about it to rescuers. Who's going to notice more injuries on what's left of the other person after the crash?
They obviously wouldn't, reading about the details of any sudden, intense crisis (e.g. Titanic) would disabuse one of this notion. If people started betraying each other the moment they were put in a dangerous situation in order to escape, they would have been killed by the more powerful and cohesive rival tribe.
My understanding is that fewer men survived the Titanic because it was NOT that sudden. Ships that sink quickly tend to have more adult male survivors because they're physically capable of getting to safety.
I'm not arguing about suddenness, I'm arguing about people beating one another over the head to survive. They simply do not.
~4% of the population is sociopathic, they'd do it. Some larger minority of selfish cowards with enough physical courage to do it, maybe. Most people, though? Nah. Most people have never killed anyone, how weird is that?!
Most people have also never been in a situation where killing someone was the only way to save their own life.
That instant response might require, ah, practice; if speaking Swahili were the only way to save your own life you'd likely be out of luck.
You don't know how to bop someone on the head?
> Even if they didn't, you could probably find someone to claim that privileges people who have kids and devalues childfree people.
No offense meant to you in particular but if you don't like that sort of reasoning and would prefer if it disappeared, don't bring it up and help it die in the shadows.
I thought about that, actually.
I figured with most antinatalist reasoning, ACX's readership is sufficiently pronatalist that mentioning a potential line of attack will help more opponents than supporters, and given the general naivete of many rationalists might be useful to bring it up.
I would not have brought it up in a more neutral or progressive forum.
Fair enough, a kind of intellectual vaccine I guess? Makes a lot of sense.
Keep in mind I may be totally off-base.
Also I'm not really pronatalist or antinatalist--I'm fine with people who want kids having more, but I'm not into coercing people who don't want them into having them (given modern mores it will just lead to more child abuse), and I'm not having any myself for a variety of reasons (divorce risk, poor personality, and the hour having passed, briefly).
>Even if they didn't, you could probably find someone to claim that privileges people who have kids and devalues childfree people.
As a childfree male myself, I, personally, refuse to support any system that devalues childfree people.
Fortunately, lifeboat situations are fairly rare.
What if Lance promises to take care of the kids financially?
Not as credible since they're not his kids.
Hm... what if the other person has life insurance for $5M and the kids will be alright financially no matter what?
It's not just financially--they'll be happier with the dad around. Boys in particular often need a male role model.
I admire your intellectual deftness, though.
Well to assume Least Convenient Possible World, we should state that Lance also has children, young, who'll absolutely be ruined if Lance is gone.
I think there are old people near the end of their lives who would give the parachute to someone else.
also, it only works because you're assuming additional people that aren't part of the equation! (the hypothetical people who Lance would help by being more charitable or whatever) If you pick a scenario that both Scott and Lance would survive, but once of them would suffer more (idk, one of them is going to get horribly sick but otherwise be okay), then there's no reason to prefer Lance
(in fact, you could easily set up the scenario to go the other way-- you have two people on a crashing plane: one of them is superior in nearly every way, including character -- they've already donated a kidney. Shouldn't you pick the one who still might be able to save someone's life, because they still have a kidney to donate?
"Another possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying?"
It's not so unsatisfying if you're not equal before the law. This is the kind of "equal" that's meant by the "all men are created equal" clause of the Declaration of Independence. It was considered kind of daring at the time.
Agreed that "Equal before the eyes of the law" was and is a very important and consequential principle. It's easy to take for granted in the first world today, but telling a medieval serf that they were equal to a Count in the eyes of the law would have been earth-shattering.
Indeed. It's so much taken for granted that you often see people assuming that the Declaration of Independence meant something else by "all men are created equal," and they mock it for advocating the absurdly false principle that everyone is equal in talents or physical attributes or something. Which is not what it's talking about at all.
I'm reminded of the observation in "The Bell Curve" that we must declare all people to be politically equal because they are obviously unequal in pretty much all other dimensions. If we were all clones of each other, nobody would bother to declare us all politically equal.
(What they didn't do was attempt to discern why societies with the principle of political equality seem to have a competitive advantage over other societies.)
I am once again begging Americans to read up on the philosophical views that went into their own damn country's founding. "All men are created equal" refers to men in the state of nature. Equality before the law *recognises* this fact; it doesn't *create* it.
A distinction without a difference. All are equal before the law is the point we're discussing because it's the one that Scott brought up, and it's true -because- they were created equal in the state of nature. The very statement says it: "All men are -created- equal." Created! There's no conflict here between the points being made.
I think it makes quite a big difference if humans are inherently equal vs. if human equality is a kind of legal fiction.
Since nobody in comments was arguing the latter (it says "created" right in the text), that's a nullity of an objection. Maybe Scott was thinking so, but everyone here agreed it was more important than that.
Hi, Alexander. Any possibility of you writing a critical analysis of coaching vs classical therapy? I'm a psychotherapist who started a new job in coaching and I feel very conflicted as it's very different to what I am used to, I'm wondering if you also explored this topic at some point in your life.
My own hunch is, like, that "inferiority" doesn't matter. Yes, you can be inferior in all kinds of ways to all kinds of other people or things, but your value is still higher than your negative value, and as such you are still, well, valuable.
Lance might be better than me in all kinds of ways, but I do remember that 20th century poem, and I made a post analyzing it, or maybe a mixup of it, and now more people know about the poem and grew to love it as well. If I didn't exist, there would be nobody to do that, even if Lance is better than me.
Some great altruism figure that organizes charities and stuff might save ten thousand people a day. I donate $50 a month on malaria nets and save 1 person a month. But if I didn't do that, that person would be dead, and he sure is very grateful to the fact that I also exist, in addition to Lance
I'm not a signed up Nazi party member but I don't have a problem with doing something subtle and sustained about ridding the gene pool of the influences that result in 1% of humans becoming the psychopaths that cause 99% of humanity's problems. Psychopaths do far more harm and cause far more suffering than any other mental illness if you consider the total impact that one has during their lifetime, perhaps more harm than all other genetic illnesses combined. Then again, what could possibly go wrong?
I assure you, most atrocities in the world have been commited by perfectly mentally healthy people --, after all it's not like the human brain isn't inherently wired for evil, which is always more effectly prevented by lack of opportunity rather than lack of desire. Do you think nazi germany or japan, for example, had a extremely high number of psychopaths at one point? People of all moral ideologies just do evil shit all the time when they have the opportunity to so due to self-interest or to obey authorities.
OP's conjecture is that if you remove the 1% leading the mob to evil, the mob won't do evil on its own.
Correct, but it isn't entirely that simple, I think the scale of "evil" will be greatly lessened, but we would still see random acts of stupidity on an interpersonal level that one could label as "evil". What I hope we would see less of is young people being conscripted and forced to go and murder their cousins in horrendous ways, as per the current madness in the Ukraine.
https://www.udio.com/songs/b9q2uCCy31r1csBuSDrmiG
For a while. Ultimately though the temptation from doing stuff like that becomes too great. And ideologies like nationalism, socialism, etc. can convince lots of people to do bad things who aren't actual psychopaths because it's beneficial for the race, the country, etc....
"ideologies" don't operate without people at their core driving them one way or another, see my comment elsewhere r.e. the small number of psychopaths required to nudge a large number of useful idiots in one direction or another.
I find it unlikely that Putin would be diagnosed with ASPD, so I don't know what the relevance of Ukraine is supposed to be.
Putin is the tip of a pyramid. He cannot mobilise the country on his own: the pyramid must comply, and the relevant parts of it - especially at the top - have therefore been carefully purged of all who neither share his goals nor can convincingly pretend to do so.
If you assassinate him, he will be replaced by the next identical pillock down the pyramid, and it is unclear whether the result will be better or worse. You'd have to replace a good chunk of at least the upper levels of the pyramid; which, to be fair, the Russians are not historically shy about doing; however the outcomes of doing that have not, by and large, been great for them.
If you shake a bucketful of pebbles, the bigger ones rise to the top. It's an emergent property of the physics of how these objects interact with each other.
If you have a sufficiently large number of humans trying to exist in proximity to each other, those more willing to cause others suffering to further their own goals will rise to the top of the emerging hierarchies. It's an inevitable property of how humans interact with each other.
Spending time around flocks of children will prove this is false. There's not a child in the world that doesn't try to lie to their parents at some point.
I am a home educator and have five children. I know exactly what children are like. Telling lies is in isolation not an indicator of much at all. However some children may manifest such behaviour at pathological levels, then that would be an indicator that they have cognitive differences. 1% is still a lot of people.
I think the normal violent thug/axe murderer type evil is a different phenomenon than ethnic cleansing/death camp type evil. You might get rid of a lot of the first by removing the most sociopathic and violently inclined from the genepool, but you wouldn't do much about the second kind. That's a social phenomenon that doesn't require weird people to operate. I don't think the median US soldier herding the Cherokee along the Trail of Tears was an especially terrible human, for example, even though he was engaged in something pretty terrible.
Name one organisation, political group, or religion etc. that didn't eventually get taken over by psychopaths. Then explain what went wrong with all of the rest of them, what was lacking in their organisational immune system that allowed psychopaths to infiltrate their cohort then work their way up to the levels with real power. I do not believe that the average human is inherently evil by nature, I do believe that perhaps a majority of people are useful idiots who are easily controlled by psychopaths though. What makes you think that the halls of power in most countries, including Japan, are any less infested with psychopaths today? I'd suggest that only their modus operandi has become more sophisticated. Claiming to subscribe to a "moral" ideology, when you really just see it as a tool to manipulate those who genuinely do, is yet another of the tricks in the psychopath's playbook.
>Name one organisation, political group, or religion etc. that didn't eventually get taken over by psychopaths.
I've read estimates that 3% of CEOs are psychopaths. This is higher than the (IIRC) 1% in the general population, but it is still far less than 100%. Granted, the 3% is presumably an equilibrium figure, where any business has existed for finite time. How much of the difference do you intend the "eventually" in your statement to cover? Also, do you expect that once an organization gets headed by a psychopath, that they never get replaced by a non-psychopath?
Try 21%, depending on your source, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/2016/09/16/gene-marks-21-percent-of-ceos-are-psychopaths-only-21-percent/
Keep in mind that political and religious organisations can last for centuries, and companies are just part of the picture.
As for if psychopaths are more likely to hand the baton over to other psychopaths, I don't know if their is any research on that but one could take into consideration the toxic environment they create and if psychopaths are better adapted to it, so they tend to accumulate in the top of hierarchies waiting to move into higher positions.
Many Thanks! Odd about the large difference between the old number that I recall and the 21% (thanks very much for the link!). Chalk it up to the replication crisis? 21% would still leave 79% of businesses lead by _non_-psychopaths.
I tried to find statistics on politicians, but didn't have any luck searching. One url, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8374040/ had a sobering note about the reliability of any of these figures:
>The meta-analytical results obtained allow us to estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%. That being said, this rate varies depending on the participants' sex (higher in males), the type of sample from the general population (higher in samples from organizations than in community samples or university students), and the type of instrument used to define psychopathy. In fact, using the PCL-R, which is currently considered the “gold standard” for the assessment and definition of psychopathy, the prevalence is only 1.2%.
Aargh!, nearly a 4X discrepancy in the two measurements. :-(
>As for if psychopaths are more likely to hand the baton over to other psychopaths, I don't know if their is any research on that but one could take into consideration the toxic environment they create and if psychopaths are better adapted to it, so they tend to accumulate in the top of hierarchies waiting to move into higher positions.
Well, alternatively, a power-seeking psychopath might want to minimize potential competitors. Many a dictator has spent time coup-proofing their subordinates.
Well all I can say is that is an under researched area and I am trying to avoid assumptions about how things really operate in large organisations, however based on personal observations (acknowledged weak evidence) there are hierarchies formed within large organisations that mirror the organisational structure but exclude most people, cronyism, and that is where we see a concentration of cooperating high functioning psychopaths at multiple levels, therefore you math above is off as it does not count the aspirational dictators amongst the ranks of the up an coming psychopaths who are innately good enough at game theory to know how to cooperate with those who are ultimately their biggest threats.
Psychopaths/sociopath can have their uses, too. Thus less like "cystic fibrosis", more sickle-cell - and not just one-gene, thus there is a spectrum, too. For a look from the other side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatsGU5UKQ You can skip the first 20 minutes
True, much has been suggested about surgeons (and certain other professions), but are those useful one's irreplaceable?
Pegrum, J., & Pearce, O. (2015). A stressful job: Are surgeons psychopaths? The Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 97(8), 331-334. doi: 10.1308/rcsbull.2015.331
https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/10.1308/rcsbull.2015.331
Try replacing surgeons ;) - even a good nurse these days is hard to find, so please be gentle with those psychopaths ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx9qUR9P2ZQ (pointless music video, but do watch the other of James Fallon, PhD: The Psychopath Inside
My wife has a medical degree and a masters degree in nursing on top of that, yep she is a Doctor Nurse Practitioner (who is a lifelong yoga practitioner too), and my brother in law is in fact a surgeon.
The point of logic one should note is that it may help some people in their surgical profession to have psychopathic traits but I have not seen research that suggests that they all do or that it is necessary or even significantly advantageous, it is simply that a trend has been noted in some professions.
Have you read this article? https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/23/washington-dc-the-psychopath-capital-of-america-218892/
Right. If we got rid of them all it might improve things for a while but everyone would be super vulnerable to the first one to appear via random mutation.
Plus you'd probably have knock-on effects like everyone becoming even more risk-averse than they already are. Or the human population would drift in the direction of autism and the Astral Codex Ten comment page would take even longer to load than it already does.
I recall a discussion on, I think, Econtalk, about the ratio of sociopathy. The fewer there are, the more advantage there is to being one, but the more there are, the less advantage there is to being one.
That would make sense. It seems like it maps pretty well to defection in the prisoner's dilemma.
I think that was explicitly a comparison. :-)
(Plenty of signed-up Nazi members would just increase that 1% to 2...sorry, I read frogtwitter.)
I don't think it's a yes-no gene. You'd get the moderately psychopathic people who didn't meet your 1% cutoff for extermination rising to positions of influence, and then being more psychopathic as it would pay off with the increasingly sheeplike general population.
Being psychopathic is a good idea if nobody else is. Lots of non-psychopaths fantasize about being psychopaths--look at murderhobos in tabletop RPGs.
My "something subtle and sustained" is incompatible with your "extermination" context, I'm not going there, nor did I ever imply that it is a single gene involved. The (you are either a sheep or a wolf) argument is a false dichotomy, the intelligent and well informed Libertarian does not fit into that structure at all.
OK, good point.
I still think it would be hard to do because there are real returns to psychopathy if not enough people are. But...who knows?
I'd take out the god gene before I'd take out the psychopathy gene.
I've thought about that.
I would want to, you shouldn't want to.
My best guess is given the lower rate of religion among autism, it's probably (negatively) correlated with whatever determines your position on the spectrum. (You're attributing external events to a deity, i.e. engaging in a false-positive theory of mind.) More autists is bad for women, because (a) autists, of whom the vast majority are male, are bad with women and tend to develop resentment toward them or in general tend not to consider their point of view because they are close to fewer of them (b) if society tends in an autistic direction, it will be bad for women overall because they will shape society in ways that benefit them at women's expense (look at Silicon Valley).
But my epistemic certainty is very, very low.
> (b) if society tends in an autistic direction, it will be bad for women overall because they will shape society in ways that benefit them at women's expense (look at Silicon Valley).
What about Silicon Valley are we looking at?
OK CHRIST ina good luck with that, finding single genes. and a new name. :-)
This may inform your future opinions,
Dewhurst K, Beard AW. Sudden Religious Conversions in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. British Journal of Psychiatry. 1970;117(540):497-507. doi:10.1192/bjp.117.540.497
Perhaps one should consider if there is a difference between spirituality and religiosity, and that neither require organised religion to function. Psychopaths exploit religious hierarchies, because they are social hierarchies. They fein religiosity in that context, they will fein polarised political or social views if their target hierarchy is based on that.
You need to look at it more abstractly, the structures and control influences that exist in human societies.
Well, first, neither psychopathy nor the capacity for spiritual experience/belief are single genes, obvs.
My single sentence was intended to be a slightly flippant commentary that if we were noodling around with people's genes / brains on a near-magical level, it would be better to remove the inclination to believe in the unbelievable than to remove the capacity to choose when to be empathic.
Many psychopaths are high-functioning, productive members of society who are simply governed by forces other than empathy. I'd rather have them than people who make choices based on the unknown and unknowable.
What if the intervention was as simple as women who have a psychopathic brother never having a child. The X chromosome carries a lot of genes associated with brain function and metabolism. This is why we have X-linked disorders, mostly suffered by males and involving some form of cognitive impact. It stands to reason then that there are also X-linked advantages to be had too.
As for your issue with religion (?), what makes you think that those people abusing religion to justify their inhumanity actually believe in anything anyway, what if they are just manipulative psychopaths who use the hierarchy of a religion to gain power/influence over others in ways not greatly different from how they achieve the same within political groups?
My issue isn't with religion, it's with the individual capacity to experience and believe in a supernatural entity / force.
While all people have some cognitive biases, faith is about *preserving* irrational ideas no matter what evidence is presented to refute them. It's about explicitly rejecting one's capacity to change one's position when provided sufficient evidence or argument.
That's a bad thing.
That can be explained as just a side effect of some people's faith directed behaviour, it is not what faith is. Look we are all living in an illusion, no matter how smart you think you are, how logical, because at the end of the day even our most rational system of thought, mathematics, is self-referential, Kurt Gödel proved that.
Faith exists as a cognitive function because it is evolutionarily advantageous. Natural selection doesn't care about anything but that which impacts on reproductive fitness.
So why do people believe in things? To fill the void we call the "unknowable" so that they can act rationally (within that system) and make decisions in conditions of high uncertainty. Faith is not about rejecting the scientific method because science doesn't even attempt to try and fill that unknowable void, at best it tries to map its boundaries. There is no conflict between those cognitive systems, they serve different purposes. This is why so many great 20th century scientific minds were also people of faith.
If you are talking about theologies in particular, not all religions are, then we need to consider what is in fact knowable and provable about people's faith based world views. Can we prove that God exists, and can we prove that God does not exist? No in both cases as we cannot even define what "God" is (only a god-like mind could), we can't make a logical statement about the question based on evidence. Nor can we be lazy and say you can't prove X is true therefore X is definitely not true.
Another interesting aspect of religiosity is that it seems to be associated with a lower incidence of depression.
Svob, C., & Weissman, M. M. (2019). The role of religiosity in families at high-risk for depression. Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 9, 1-6. doi: 10.1016/j.jemep.2019.03.00
Psychopaths aren't what you think they are, and most dictators probably aren't psychopaths. Actual psychopaths are pretty easy to spot and can't function all that well in normal society, so they normally don't rise very far outside of really weird and extreme circumstances (eg. Prigozhin *might* have been a psychopath but probably wasn't; Putin frankly isn't).
What you're thinking of is just callousness, which is probably a normal psychologically health response to situations which call for it.
yeah, yeah, nah... see below.
Psychopathic personality characteristics amongst high functioning populations
September 2016Crime Psychology Review 2(1):1-21
September 20162(1):1-21
DOI:10.1080/23744006.2016.1232537
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308481178_Psychopathic_personality_characteristics_amongst_high_functioning_populations
Hard to read under the big “RETRACTED” stamp…
https://libgen.is/scimag/10.1080%2F23744006.2016.1232537
That paper seems to have been retracted because of plagiarism, rather than because of a problem in the data or conclusions:
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/01/12/authors-withdraw-paper-psychopathic-traits-bosses/
(Of course, plagiarism is often a warning sign, and there may be other problems with the paper. But the retraction alone doesn't disqualify the paper as evidence if it seems to hold up otherwise.)
> I'm not a signed up Nazi party member but I don't have a problem with doing something subtle and sustained about ridding the gene pool of the influences that result in 1% of humans becoming the psychopaths that cause 99% of humanity's problems.
Good thing you opened with the defense that you aren't in a Nazi party, otherwise your argument would be indistinguishable from Nazi lingo. Then again, not being "a signed up nazi party member" is not exactly the most bullet-proof defense of all time, if what you really wanted to say was that you don't share Nazi views or values. You certainly do seem to approve of certain Nazi methods.
Good thing the reset of the audience has a sense of humor.
I am truly sorry for your loss, or where you born without one?
I think you need to work on your delivery then, your comment did not read like a joke at all. And I'm not sure who you mean with "the rest of the audience" either - none of the replies so far, save one maybe, read like a joke reply either.
Wouldn't just be more efficient to simply ignore you?
Absolutely. But if you're the comedian here, then that makes me the heckler, so if you choose to engage, you can't just call it quits like that. Also, if you wanna go pro as a comedian, I'd advise you to not quit your day job just yet.
"that makes me the heckler" no that makes you a very ordinary, garden variety, troll. :-)
Another angle would be getting explicit about how different ways of thinking one's capacity affect one's life. "I do what I can with what I've got" might lead to better outcomes than identifying with one's place in a hierarchy.
Strongly agree. "I do what I can" might (and does) sometimes lead to better outcomes, but also might (and does) lead to worse outcomes. But for whom, and at what cost? Good to be explicit about that.
I imagine a version of that meme with the crowd "who wants X" vs "who wants to do X", with the crowd acclaiming the proposition "who wants to be treated better than their actual usefulness" vs "who wants to live in a society that has collapsed due to no longer treating people according to their usefulness".
I've been playing with the ideal that (ideal) liberalism is about recognizing that treating all people as valuable pays off in some ways and (ideal) conservatism is better at recognizing that there's work which needs to be done and some people are better at it than others.
Language is so odd.
No one would willingly give their child cystic fibrosis genes. This seems clear. Should we say that such genes are inferior, or that persons with those genes are genetically inferior? That has so many more connotations being dragged along in the background.
Is there a phrase that we could use instead that lacked the ugly baggage, but still expressed the idea that genes that cause suffering and untimely death without any obvious counterweight seem tragic if due to luck and cruel if the result of intent?
If the issue is that genetically inferior sounds right-wing then couldn’t we use leftist-coded language for the worse off to replace it like Genetically Disadvantaged, Genetically Marginalised, or Genetically Underprivileged?
Or maybe the genetically bit could go too, Mutationally, Allelically, Hereditarily, Genomically, or DNA Variationally ?
It’s less about being accepted by left & more about not sounding like a nazi
It's not about "discarding" anyone, any more than working to end generational poverty is about 'discarding' the poor. In both cases the point is to protect the next generation from suffering under the same burdens.
Embryos, yeah, but not people. For the political tribe we're talking about, I don't think the objection is usually based on concern for the embryos themselves.
Oh Generationally could be a good substitute for Genetically.
Sounds much better if your were using embryo selection to end generational disadvantages rather than genetic inferiority.
Why not? They're just "taking up space", after all.
> If the issue is that genetically inferior sounds right-wing then couldn’t we use leftist-coded language for the worse off to replace it like Genetically Disadvantaged, Genetically Marginalised, or Genetically Underprivileged?
No, because when the meaning of a term is bad, the term automatically becomes pejorative.
Phenotypically?
Genetically harmed?
I'd like to suggest that nobody can make you feel anything, as explored in this extremely empowering buddhist concept: "drive all blames inward" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fNC54L3GhZe6TXezw/yanni-s-shortform?commentId=y6FHHdD2uEaYC25QY
I suppose I might ask you: why do you suppose the U.S. legal system has decided not to disprivilege you vs. Lance?
(Or, more generally, not to do this to anyone — to have no nobles, no gentry... no class that, it has been decided, are worth more than the rest.)
Is it all down to practical considerations? All based on the fact that it would be too hard to tell who is superior every time, or perhaps on the basis that it makes everyone get mad a lot?
I don't think so. Not that there couldn't be really dumb philosophical principles enshrined in law, I mean — just using the question to try to get at the intuition about whether that would be *desirable*, even if perfectly possible.
I think there *is* a moral sense for which most people are worth more or less the same. I'll have to think about it more to fully justify it, probably, but I'd say "something something good-hearted something something capacity to love, to feel happy, something, suffers just as much as, something."
If it's just hard to tell who's superior but you can get it right 51% of the time, it would still be worth considering it. The problem is that it's too easy for the people in power to say they're the ones that are superior.
A good point, perhaps. I'm not sure most people would like to make the judgment based on ability, though — classic example here would be, like, Shirō Ishii, or something.
(...you know my first instinct was to name a different WW2 doctor, but I'm trying to buck the tradition, here—)
> U.S. legal system has decided not to disprivilege you vs. Lance?
...has it, though? It is a more complex question than "the laws are the same for everyone" if some categories of people predictably end up with very different outcomes from the exact same laws. Take, for instance, the old adage, "if the punishment is a fine, it's only illegal for poor people" - same law, but one class of people end up in jail (because they can't pay the fine) while another just need to decide whether the thing they want to do is worth the money.
I think it has, yeah, for all practical purposes.
-------------------------------------
It can be argued re: which is the closer to "all are equal before the law", between 1) "all receive the same punishment" and 2) "all receive different punishments, but ostensibly the same hardship", true.
However, even disregarding considerations such as...
• "doesn't introducing another discretion-amenable variable make it more, and not less, likely that people will be treated differently?"—...
—...or:
• "is the fine solely to punish, or is there some calculus here wherein you have literally 'paid your debt' if you paid the ticket, making it thereby unreasonable to amend the fine based purely on inconvenience-to-perp?"—...
— even disregarding these, it seems to me that the *intent* is still fairly clear; that's how the principle is explicitly justified, even, AFAIK: levying the same penalty for the same crime upon one and all is *meant* to display no preference for one citizen over another.
(And as long as that's the intent, I think the [...vague gesture at an] argument I made to Scott remains cogent! I'm not married to defending the U.S. criminal justice system or anything — just my thoughts on the objection you floated, 'sall, and not like some cornerstone of the case — so to speak.)
-------------------------------------
Actually, thinking about it a bit more, I might argue that even the *effect* can be framed as self-adjusting-to-approximate-fairness:
→ Suppose Person A is made extremely anxious by interactions with LE, and Person B doesn't mind so much really — ought we give Person B a harsher punishment so that they're just as upset as A?
I say:
→ Probably not: both for A) obvious practical purposes, and B) because we all have our own tolerances for risks like "possibility of being fined for speeding"...
...and, hence, it is maybe a feature rather than a bug that we may all adjust our behavior such that we end up pulled over a personally-commensurate amount.
(...or else we just have real poor risk-evaluation ability — which resulting extra hardship is, perhaps, its own just punishment...)
We do have, legislatively speaking, an upper class of politicians and bureaucrats, to whom the laws apply differently; obvious example is that it is a separate and more serious charge to kill Feds of various flavors than citizens. Another one: Feds can fly armed on commercial airplanes, even ones who are not law enforcement.
Is this a privilege given to the *person,* or to the *position?*
I'd argue there's a difference, in terms of whether we're thereby attributing greater *personal worth* or merely distributing *practical job-enabling legal tools* — much like e.g. the power-plant doesn't let most people into crucial and/or dangerous areas, but does allow some; it is not the policy of the plant that employees with greater access are a superior class of person, though!
(Not that it matters, in terms of the main thrust of my initial comment, I think — whether the U.S. lives strictly up to the ideal is less the point than if the example is pointing [heh] at some I-assume-fairly-common intuition about the difference between being better-at-stuff and being worth-more-as-a-human-being [heh heh... okay, those aren't even really puns, I deserve no chuckles I know–].)
I think another important meaning of "equality" is just that you aren't prejudged -- that your actions are judged the same as if anyone else had done them. People aren't split into nobles and peasants where the former are just considered *inherently* better and more deserving, regardless of their actual actions.
Personally I'd call this more "orthogonality" than "equality" -- it doesn't really mean that people are inherently equal (even though people often phrase it that way); rather it means that people *aren't* inherently *unequal* because what it's really saying is that inherence *doesn't exist*, only action. But "equality", confusingly, is what people call it.
There was an old Aella post on this topic, but it was on her old blog and I can't find it anymore. Hopefully it still exists somewhere!
I accept the theoretical validity of your hypothetical superior Lance, but in practice you've ignored the significant problem of measurement accuracy. I believe that if you choose two people at random it's unlikely that you'll be able to state which is inferior, because there are so many dimensions to assess, and so many confounds (see e.g. Trading Places). There are exceptions----Trump is clearly inferior to just about everyone I know personally---but I think those are rare.
I also think that the rate exceptions are not a problem. It's healthy to look up to certain superior people as role models.
Trump's secret sauce might be that the average Joe does not feel inferior listening to the Donald. At work, I met lots of averages Joes - in private I avoid them. Because they are just as "inferior" as Trump, most even more so. (Scott had interesting Trump-posts on SSL: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/03/theses-on-trump/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/23/a-whiter-shade-of-candidate/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
He even had one quoting SSL-readers personal ! experiences with DT. All were positive. (If so can help me find that post in the SSL archives, please?) Disclosure: Scott and me are very much contra Trump - just not because he is inferior/worse compared to usual Americans but to usual US-presidents at that job.
That's a big part of it. He definitely has the common touch, which is a huge asset for any politician, and becomes a lot more valuable when institutional trust is low.
I mean, would you say elites *haven't* screwed the average American?
Trump is a far, far better extemporaneous bullshitter than anyone I know personally. It's not even close.
Or, hear me out, we could train our brains not to feel depressed when finding out there's somebody better than us. I'm not saying it's practical to do this with the journalists, for the first case, but the latter seems not only manageable, but also part of what should be basic education.
I notice that often when I think something I also mentally add a number of caveats that are almost subliminal. If I met Lance I could mostly feel that he's my superior, but on parallel threads I might remind myself that it's normal and not something to be depressed about, that I may be seeing him in a good moment and don't have a full image of his (private?) life, that he probably had contextual and genetic advantages I did not and so on. Occasionally one such thread may get bumped up to full awareness and get me to actually feel an emotion - say Lance is my old schoolmate with no obvious advantages over me - in which case yeah, I'd feel a bit shitty and I see no reason I shouldn't. Or maybe a thread will remind me that I'm seeing him on instagram so I should take it with a ladle-full of salt.
I don't think this a particularly difficult skill. I'm pretty sure kids and many teenagers don't have it, and I've heard therapy terms that sound like not having it is a problem, but I think it's much better to try and find ways of coping with reality ("Lance is my superior") rather than reframing it into a more palatable way.
It's possible (this is very conjectural) that people generally don't mind inequality if they're expecting it. People generally don't mind inequality in the workplace, not that many people get particularly riled up about inherited wealth and basically no-one minds differences in athletic ability. My guess would be that people don't link losing competitions, and in intelligence, personal success and (possibly?) attractiveness, we insist throughout everyone's childhood that they're all equal and all good at these things, and slowly slipping behind other people in their adult life feels like constantly losing [a competition/what you thought you had].
I think the egalitarianism of American society makes this harder. Nobody's *supposed* to be better than anyone else, even though of course someone always is.
Yes, I try to have the response of: if they're a nice, decent person, I'm happy for them, and if they aren't, well, I get to feel smug for a bit.
>Or, hear me out, we could train our brains not to feel depressed when finding out there's somebody better than us.
Agreed. My point of view is that:
There are 8 billion of us.
Even if there are a thousand different qualities on which we could be ranked, the odds of winding up as the "best" on _any_ of those qualities is 1 in 8 million.
Forget it. Almost no one is going to win every competition, even on a single quality, but the median result, at least in 1st world nations, is reasonably decent.
A mantra that has served me well: "If you are one-in-a-million, that means there's a thousand guys in China just like you"
Many Thanks! Very much agreed. Good mantra!
"inferior" implies some sort of ranking, and there is no fixed ranking applicable to all cases, and sometimes no ranking at all, depending on the situation. So the term is not very useful by itself, only relative to a situation where a certain kind of ranking matters.
For example, for cystic fibrosis instead of "inferior" we can just say "less adapted to life", without implying a fixed ranking in all situations (people with cystic fibrosis sure get triaged first in ER).
Yes, this!. Better and worse, superior and inferior, all are dependent on the purpose and the environment. Sickle-cell and malaria prevalence is another good example.
I think the sense in which the "inferior" in "you are not inferior to anyone" is used in is obvious. You are not *ethically* inferior to anyone. Lance gets a parachute over Scott because Lance is *more practically useful*, but Scott doesn't *deserve* to live less than Lance does; if two tools are destroyed but one is useless and another is worth millions nobody would weep for the useless tool, but the death of a wholly useless man is a tragedy in itself and no less of a tragedy in itself than the death of an immensely useful one (separately from the loss of value caused by it).
I think there's something here that other comments are brushing up against that's also related to the Veil of Ignorance or Categorical Imperative or something.
E.g.: under a Good decision rule you have equal "rights" (i.e., in a broader sense than just US legal rights) because, yes, under the inside view you might want to save one person more than the other, but outside view you don't know who you would be.
1. All of Scott's weaknesses are by the grace of the lord, so we feel less inferior. (Except it does not work on/for/to/with me. I can't even do prepositions properly).
2. Jokes: a) the smbc about one of those "two exceptions":
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/program-2
b) parachutes: A small airplane is about to crash. There are 3 passengers on board: Trump, the pope and a school boy. But only 2 parachutes.
Donald Trump said: "I am the smartest President ever in American history , so my people don't want me to die." He took the first pack and jumped out of the plane.
Pope Francis said to the 10 year old schoolboy: " My son, I am old and don't have many years left, so I let you have the last parachute." The boy said , " That's okay , Your Holiness, there's a parachute left for you. America's smartest President ever took my schoolbag."
I read that joke 2 decades ago, with Bill Gates as the butt.
It was popular in Germany with Georg Bush jr., I recall (without the "smartest ever"). It is probably much older - it sure does exist in many versions (4 and 5 passengers, known names and professions). I do consider Trump the perfect impersonation. Boys will be boys and popes will be popes.
I feel like it works better with Bush Jr and especially Trump--the person has to have a reputation for either being dumb or impulsive. I feel like Gates would have recognized the parachute.
I disagree. The joke only really works when the person has an unearned reputation for intelligence. But it definitely works so long as it is a person you dislike.
One thing to note when adding up multiple traits of value is that usually traits are scored in a basically logarithmic manner, either because human perception is logarithmic or because the sampling procedures used for psychometric measurement tends to favor logarithmic scaling.
(E.g. the relationship between IQ and success on difficult tasks, or between IQ and income, tends to be ~exponential. And if you ask people to estimate the frequency they engage in a type of behavior, they can reasonably well estimate its order of magnitude, and the frequencies for e.g. crying or masturbation or drinking will be ~lognormally distributed.)
If you add together a bunch of logarithms, then you multiply together their linearly scaled distributions. This ends up measuring something that you can intuitively think of as "well-roundedness", whereas if you imagine that Actual Value is a linear function of the final non-logarithmic measures, then it doesn't capture Actual Value very well because the lognormal distributions will have a few crazy outliers that determine most of the value.
If you actually want to rank people by value while considering these dynamics, often a better approach is to consider their most extreme traits and equate their overall value with the value of those traits, because the logarithm of a sum is approximately equal to the maximum of the logarithms.
As a very minor note on CF, those lifespan estimates are generally outdated due to much better treatment protocols, the 300k a year drug definitely works for the most common mutation, but there are multiple types of mutation on that gene and they don’t all express the borked protein in the same way.
"Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation."
Uh, no, what the hell are you talking about?
I don't think that way at all. I think it's a bit weird that you do, and extremely weird that you think everyone else does.
By the way, you don't have to dig for trivialities to make yourself better than Lance at something. Nobody can write this blog better you do, and that's not trivial at all.
Situations like that abound; most parents are the best parents their children could ever have, even if they're not that good at parenting, because you can't just swap out a parent like a car part. I don't know anything about your personal relationships but I really doubt everyone you know and love would prefer to have Lance in your place.
I think the issue is that an unqualified "superior" doesn't just mean "more valuable in every way" but "more valuable from everyone's point of view".
And regardless of Lance's many virtues, there will always be at least one person to whom I am more valuable than Lance, and that's me. Everyone else might value Lance more than they value me, but I value my own existence at infinity, so nobody will ever be more valuable than me in that sense. (I also value my wife and kids at infinity, before anyone asks.)
This, I think, is the central objection to describing people as superior or inferior to others -- everyone has the right to their own value system in which they, and the people they love, matter more than everyone else.
As others have highlighted, I think the issue is what you measure when assessing if one is superior to another. People with low IQ might be much happier than people with high IQ - in which way they should be considered inferior? They're literally living more fulfilling lives.
I often think the LessWrong diaspora resorts far too readily to "status" in its explanations for social phenomena, and perhaps Scott's post here is deliberately avoiding recourse to a word that can provoke a lot of eye-rolling. But the obvious solution to the puzzles here seems to be: "Duh, it's all about status!"
Evolution has given us strong emotional responses to status hierarchies and status threats, because such hierarchies were decent proxies for survival and reproductive success. The result was that humans ended up caring more about status than about actual survival or reproduction. (This why people are willing to sacrifice their lives in battle or become celibate monks.) When you call someone inferior, the problem isn't that you "think they’re less than human and maybe want to kill them." The problem is that by calling them inferior, you have already done something *worse* than killing them.
Why is "genetic inferiority" a particularly serious status threat? A full response to this question would take several books, but the short explanation is that modern western culture has substituted "DNA" for "the soul" in its thinking about individual essences. To call someone "inferior" is an insult; to call them "genetically inferior" is an insult *sub specie aeternitatis*.
I think your reply gets to the bottom of this dilemma.
Calling someone ‘inferior’ drags in all kinds of bad ideas about status from the past whether they are relevant or not. We need to figure out which ideas are relevant and which should be discarded.
If we admit that the person with cystic fibrosis who will likely die next week is inferior, we are admitting that certain genetic differences are inferior which is admitting that certain races are inferior and that can't be right because slavery was bad. There's a leap of logic somewhere along the chain that is invalid. Where is it?
Taking the ‘one parachute’ case, would we give the parachute to the person with CF? Or the healthy person? What about the place on the lifeboat? What about if the COVID ward is full and we need to decide who should get the last ventilator?
As a society, we absolutely did decide that people with certain genetic and/or physical conditions should get preference for a ventilator and appropriately so, IMO.
‘Status’ and ‘superiority’ used to mean one thing but now they mean something else. We need to discard the old meanings and decide what they mean to us now. The words (and the ideas they represent) are not intrinsically bad.
Same argument in a different dimension: given a choice between Lionel Messi (or Michael Jordan or Richard Feynman or Beethoven) in their prime or Joe Schmo, who should have the nicest house?
In our society (and approximately every society that ever existed) we would give the nicest house to Messi. In an honest world we would say that Messi deserves the nicest house because he is better (that is, more valuable to society). But there is a taboo against saying someone is better because, in the old days, saying that someone was better than someone else justified slavery and slavery is bad.
Ideas about status are tied up in ancient debates about race that are no longer relevant because race is no longer relevant. We should discard those ancient debates and think about what is relevant to us.
>"Messi deserves the nicest house"
I don't think talking about what people "deserve" is going to help resolve the problems Scott discusses here. Talking about what people deserve is among the habits that gave rise to these problems in the first place.
What's a better word? Entitled? Allowed under the law? Stole?
I think “deseve” only has negative connotations because of injustices that happened long ago. "Deserve" is a perfectly good concept and a perfectly good word.
Scott and many commenters here lean towards consequentialism in their moral thinking, so they don't really see desert as a basic moral category. If Alice thinks people can genuinely "deserve" certain rewards or punishments, while Bob thinks the concept of desert is just a potentially useful heuristic that can allow us to reach good outcomes via a system of rewards and punishments, it's easy for miscommunication to result.
(I think part of Scott's puzzlement here arises from his difficulty understanding the commitments of people who think in terms of desert, because he doesn't see how those commitments can be made logically consistent. I would agree, but I think the appropriate response is to recognize that for many people, logical consistency in moral thinking is a secondary concern at best.)
I'm a consequentialist and I agree with Bob. Rewarding people who deserve it results in those people doing more things that deserve higher rewards. I think Alice is mistaken.
My guess is that Scott is not puzzled at all and he is asking these questions to tease out the differences between Alice and Bob.
TIL that desert has an additional meaning I didn't know of before. Thanks.
Yep — pronounced like "dessert," but etymologically unrelated!
> In our society (and approximately every society that ever existed) we would give the nicest house to Messi.
That's not actually true.
In approximately every society that ever existed, including our own, people in a position to give away houses overwhelmingly give them away to their kids (or other family members) who are vastly more important to them than any public figure.
Which isn't to say Messi might not end up with the nicest house in the neighborhood, but that's solely because he's aggregating small values across a vast number of people.
Joe Schmo is a lot more important to his friends and family than Messi ever will be, but there's only so much wealth that they have at their disposal to show this appreciation.
Messi, on the other hand, is only marignally important to the majority of people who care about him at all, but there are many times more of them than folks who care about Joe Schmo.
If you're worth only $1 each to a million people, you've suddenly got a million dollars. At the same time, each of those people have people who are vastly more important to them than you are, but they don't have a million dollars to give away.
If you use a very narrow interpretation of the word “give” you might have a point. But I am sure you understood that I intended a broader definition that says Messi gets the best house because society wants him to have the best house.
In what situations (if ever) is it useful to attribute "wants" to [a?] society?
What moral significance (if any) should we attach to the satisfaction of those wants?
Let's say we have two societies.
The first society says it will give out houses equally to everyone without regard to their merit. Perhaps they'll save a few houses for members of the Politburo or the gymnasts who win olympic medals, but on the whole, they believe — and pass laws that say — no one deserves a better house. I'd say that society wants to distribute houses in a certain way.
Now consider a second society that says the best houses should go to the people who have the most money and the most money should go to the people who deserve it. I'd say that society wants the people with the most money (and therefore the best football players) to have the best houses. If they didn't want that, they could change the laws to implement a different preference.
Hey! Maybe there's even a third option! Some societies want the best houses to go to the people whose parents have the best houses. Again, this society could change that if they wanted to.
I wrote a bit about that here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/those-are-my-tomatoes
"Society" doesn't exist.
If you were to ask the *members* of society what they want, you'd likely get the majority answering that a footballer - even one as good as Messi - doesn't deserve to be nearly as rich as he is.
If you mean to say that the social dynamics in society are such that Messi ends up with the best house - no disagreement there; I even explained how those social dynamics work, roughly.
To say that the result of such social dynamics are the expression of actual desires, however, is wrong on its face. The long-standing social support for wealth redistribution should be proof enough of this.
And yet the social support for wealth distribution never reaches critical mass and Messi has a very nice house.
Messi is a strange choice here, since he has a growth hormone disorder. Without expensive treatments with HGH he would have been very short.
He was quite good at football even so.
That's a big part of it.
I do think the whole Nazi experience did make claiming genetic inferiority for others look particularly bad.
Indeed. The substitution of "Nazism" for "Satan" in the western ethical cosmos has been another unfortunate development, producing much muddled thinking!
(This development was, of course, not quite as unfortunate as Nazism itself.)
yes, eugenics was practically mainstream early 20th century, in the west.
I think this nails it. People don't like the idea because they experience it as a survival threat, even though it isn't one (and is barely even a status threat, since everyone already knows that it's better not to have schizophrenia than to have it...just the word "inferior" itself terrifies people because of its emotional salience).
Surprisingly interesting! (I guess it’s because I’m too used to tricking myself into having a poor opinion of my worth).
To the question "Are people with fibrosis genetically inferior?", one could say something like "when you break your legs, say, that makes you disabled, it makes your life worse, you’d say yes if someone offered you to fix it instantly… but that doesn’t make you less worthy or less respectable than you were before. You’re still as much of a human being as you were before you decided to learn skiing!". For genetic disorders, there’s often no "before", but it’s actually similar, right? And yet, we react to it _completely differently_. Same with people who have friends who are better than them. That is: when I see a forest, I don’t go "okay, that tree’s better than all the others, so let’s just keep that one". I’m not sure how to make sense of that, though. I want to say something about how we feel like we’re in competition with our "friends" all the time, but that sounds really simplistic and kooky when I try to phrase it :-)
consistency check:
* do you think about memetic selection in similar ways as you think about genetic selection? (treating a "carrier" different based on which meme or gene it carries)
For "You are not inferior to anyone" read: "the infantile judgement "You're okay, I'm not okay" is false". The world is still unequal but not as defined by a terrified toddler.
Although the "eugenics bad" argument is effective, I have found calling them (rightfully so) Nazi-esque to be lackluster in reception.
Use sickle cell anemia gene selection due to malaria. Or just use extinct banana variants to show value for genetic diversity being superior to monoculture populations.
> genetic diversity being superior to monoculture populations
I'm sorry, but what does advocating for banana eugenics have to do with the post? If anything, this is the most "Nazi-esque" comment I've read in the responses.
Advocating against monocultures is decidedly the opposite to that of a “Nazi-esque” ideology. Hope this helps.
You weren't saying that banana monocultures were genetically inferior? Or is it just that being homogenous is inferior to being heterogenous?
I'm not sure I would say inferior would be the right word choice for what I am saying. Genetic diversity allows for a protective barrier for unforeseen random impetus.
Sickle cell anemia saved lives due to the disease mitigating transmission of malaria in said sub-population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_resistance_to_malaria
Strict monocultures like Gros Michel bananas allowed for infection to cause an extinction event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana
It's a big argument for ethical concerns in allele selection. Even when those actions are to reduce human suffering in the short term.
I'm confused why the superior/inferior dichotomy wouldn't extend to human populations if you're willing to apply it to bananas. And while banana and potato monoculture disasters are strong cases for genetic diversity I don't see how the sickle cell trait is more than just a specific adaptation. From my understanding the reason why it doesn't spread to the entire population in malaria-affected regions is because having two parents with the trait leads to sickle cell anemia.
I kind of hate this. "Haha, you can't trick me" sure feels like putting a semantic stopsign around the concept of superiority/inferiority. It's fine to do it to a journalist because conversing with a journalist is not a matter of epistemics; not so in this case. This kind of thinking may prevent the "inner" journalist from cancelling your soul, but it also allows them to put constraints on your epistemics. This is even worse than what "outer" journalists do, which is merely putting constraints on your _expression_.
Well, I'm sure this isn't anything new to Scott, in fact he wrote about this sort of stuff back in the SSC days.
Bad journalist is a pretty good analogy for the inner critic. This stuff - inequality etc. is especially prone to triggering childish ideas and feelings about who is or isn't okay, thinking under those conditions isn't going to lead to good conclusions.
Humans mostly work in teams - and it's a solid fact that teams with a diverse range of thinking styles make better decisions than culturally uniform teams:
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/how-to-be-an-anti-neoracist
Einstein was intellectually superior to his friends Grossmann and Besso, but the team of three men with complementary thinking styles was much stronger than Einstein working alone:
https://www.nature.com/articles/527298a
Call me a collectivist, but I don't really understand the point of judging the intellectual superiority or inferiority of individuals. It seems more meaningful to wonder whether a team that includes a member with schizophrenia risk alleles might perform better than a team of uniform neurotypicals. I have strong intuitions about the answer.
Another basic problem with individual superior/inferior judgements is the possible implication that Grossmann and Besso were obliged to kneel and lick Einstein's boots. In my experience, blithe subordination degrades team performance. The fact that superior Einstein viewed his inferior friends as equals with standing to challenge his ideas is what made their team work. Doing the Church Lady superior dance just gets in the way.
I probably wouldn't eliminate schizophrenia genes, for reasons along those lines (I suspect the marginal gains of having a schizophrenic on your team would be offset by the increased marginal risk of paranoid delusions disrupting morale, but that's not an excuse not to try). But I'm not so sure about cystic fibrosis. And I think the images you have in your mind of what hierarchy looks like (boot licking, the church lady dance) are seriously skewed towards the negative, which we've all experienced, but there is another side. Who enforces workplace equality except a higher authority?
I would eliminate schizophrenia alleles - there's not enough team diversity benefit to outweigh the massive human misery caused by schizophrenia. But that might be a distraction - my point might be better illustrated by the Scott and Lance on a plane scenario. If I add the wrinkle that Scott happens to currently be serving as President of the United States then Scott should definitely get the parachute because his value to team America would far outweigh Lance's intellectual superiority.
I refrain from naming my employer - to emphasize the point that I'm speaking only for myself in this venue - but I internally sounded the warning about literature showing that cloth masks don't work in a building-wide email in the Fall of 2020 (long after proper medical masks and N95s were available on the open market).
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/cloth-masks-suck
Higher authorities anointed to enforce workplace equality sent me a cease-and-desist letter. Last week, one of the authorities did a lame Church Lady superior dance performance in front of Congress. The problem I'm invoking is that when superior individuals start thinking they don't have to listen to critiques coming from their inferiors, team performance is degraded.
Ah sorry to hear that, its no fun. But I can't imagine any real-world equality drive that wouldn't depend on some kind of coercion from a higher authority. Which may be a good reason to resist all equality-drives, but that isn't my position and I'm not sure it's yours, judging by the generally pro-diversity tone of your original post.
We're on the same page. I accept the need for hierarchy in management of large teams. Here, I'll put in a plug for my dad's management system, BOSSA nova https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-LmtcUSN8k . It's hierarchical, but the key feature is that people at the bottom of the organization have a seat at the table in the top circle of management. If my employer used BOSSA nova - or if I were in a union - I wouldn't have been told that inferiors must sit down and shut up because the superior authority must never be challenged.
I worry that thinking about individual superiority in isolation from thinking about the individual's service to a team just promotes the type of individual hubris that gave me the smackdown. It turned out I was right. Lives would have been saved if my inferior ass had been listened to.
And that's not even going into the silly starting assumption that existing systems can do a reasonable job of judging individual merit. Academia has routinely judged minds ranging from Einstein to Kariko as intellectually inferior. And it has judged certain clowns who testified before Congress wearing cloth novelty masks from the local baseball team to be superior. Another reason to be wary of superiority judgements is that we're routinely terrible at it.
Is your dad influenced by the Rule of St Benedict? Apparently there is a rule that the youngest monk should speak first at chapter. But it sounds like your position is something like: genetic engineering is likely to signal boost agreeable traits, because most people don't like conflict or challenge - which means we lose the benefit of disagreeable traits.
Good lord are those Benedictine rules complicated. And I'd call some of them a form of deadly organizational poison. Wiki:
"Chapter 5 prescribes prompt, ungrudging, and absolute obedience to the superior in all things lawful, 'unhesitating obedience' being called the first step (Latin gradus) of humility."
Yeah, um, no thanks!
It's just a guess, but I bet if we engineered all schizophrenia risk alleles out of the population we'd likely take a take a hit on creativity. Agreeability/disagreeability is different - and I note that my reflexive rejection of Chapter 5 is celebrating the fact that I score pretty low on the agreeability axis. I definitely wouldn't want to engineer away disagreeability. Disagreeables can be high-value team members.
Also, I can't resist putting in a plug for another current line of interest. I'm no longer sure genetic engineering is even necessary. I can imagine that there may be epigenetic - or even hidden ordinary genetic - ways to get the job done.
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/can-self-cleaving-dna-resurrect-lamarck?r=5cli6
OK, I take it back. The push-back from TGGP below helps me see that we have nowhere near enough understanding of the possible hidden consequences of removing schizophrenia risk alleles. We could theoretically end up in a society with no artists. I'm with you - let's keep the schizophrenia genes, at least for now.
I’ve worked on diverse teams since starting work in a scientific and IT field and someone’s background has no bearing on the science. There isn’t a science view from India that is antagonistic to or can form a synthesis with Mexican science. (Post modernists do see science as just another form of knowledge no different from any folk knowledge, but you wouldn’t probably trust a post modernist to build a bridge).
> The problem with having five old white guys slapping each other on the back while making life-or-death business decisions on the golf course isn’t that they’re old, white, male, and rich
These particular white guys are old, black snappers, male and rich. No doubt, expressed like that we have a problem. If there was some way to go after inherited wealth or privilege, alumni benefits or unearned status then I’d be all in. It used to be called socialism.
But what if the team was not just rich,male and white but just white. A Ukrainian immigrant. An outsourced Albanian engineer. A Scotsman with a heavy accent. A deplorable. These people are, alone, far far different from each other than black, Asian, Indian Americans are from white Americans. Yank diversity isn’t real diversity.
However even if you got these incredibly diverse whites on a team, the diversity wouldn’t change much at all. Maybe localisation into Gaelic would be easier.
I think we're agreeing - the problem with the golf course guys is *not* their race and gender uniformity - the problem is their uniformity of thinking style and their failure to challenge each other's comforting starting assumptions.
Am I inferring correctly that you find Scotland to be comparatively free of the blight of neoracist DEI ideology? Sounds great! That might be where I'll flee if Trump gets re-elected.
Rather than intuitions you should seek out evidence on the question.
Another opportunity for shameless self-promotion! Intuition is what scientists use when deciding which hypotheses are worth testing:
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/extraordinary-evidence-requires-extraordinary?r=5cli6
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/speculation-is-not-a-dirty-word?r=5cli6
My intuition that people with schizophrenia risk alleles might give some types of teams intellectual diversity benefits comes from circumstantial evidence I've seen in the literature - plus direct personal experience teaming up with people who have a family history of schizophrenia. They're remarkably creative individuals, in my experience. Something really could be lost if we were to remove all the schizophrenia risk alleles from the population - particularly if we consider team performance, as opposed to individual performance. I doubt the team performance benefits are big enough to outweigh the staggering amount of misery caused by schizophrenia, but that's beside the point of whether the analogy to cystic fibrosis alleles is appropriate. There is zero benefit arising from cystic fibrosis alleles - whereas there are plausible benefits from schizophrenia alleles.
If you have different intuitions about the hypothesis I'd love to hear what evidence gives you a different view.
What literature are you referring to?
Two links in the second paragraph are just a couple examples:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cbuck/p/how-to-be-an-anti-neoracist
Intro sections of those papers cite many more.
I'm not aware of any specific studies involving people with schizophrenia risk alleles - hence I call it "circumstantial" evidence - but we know for sure that people with different thinking styles makes for stronger teams. So to the extent that people at risk of schizophrenia tend to have different thinking styles, they could benefit team performance.
Those links aren't merely not about schizophrenia risk alleles. They're not about schizophrenia at all.
Right - those links are about whether cognitively diverse groups outperform groups where everybody has the same thinking style (answer: conclusive yes). For the question of whether people with schizophrenia risk alleles have distinctive thinking styles that might hypothetically benefit certain types of teams, I turn to Perplexity (results below). Is anybody else out there having as much fun with that thing as I have been? Caveat emptor: it hallucinates sometimes.
Perplexity doesn't provide any evidence supporting my intuition that people with schizophrenia risk alleles tend to be more creative (useful!), but I also note that Perplexity tends to over-emphasize pathology. One time it told me "novelty-seeking" is a psychopathology. Bigotry! But if you take a trust-but-verify approach Perplexity is at least a quick way of pulling together a good list of citations to drill down on.
Perplexity: Based on the search results provided, there is evidence that individuals with a higher polygenic risk score for schizophrenia tend to exhibit differences in certain cognitive abilities and thinking styles compared to those with lower genetic risk, even if they do not develop schizophrenia itself. Here are the key findings:
## Cognitive Abilities
- Higher polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia are associated with lower general cognitive ability (e.g. IQ, processing speed) in the general population [1][2][3][4][5][6][14]. This suggests schizophrenia risk alleles may contribute to cognitive deficits.
- Among individuals with schizophrenia, cognitive performance is correlated with polygenic risk scores for IQ and educational attainment, but not directly with the polygenic risk score for schizophrenia itself [5][11]. This implies cognitive impairment in schizophrenia may be partly mediated by the same genetic factors influencing cognition in the general population.
- The negative association between schizophrenia polygenic risk and cognition appears to emerge after the typical age of psychosis onset, suggesting a neurodevelopmental rather than neurodegenerative effect [3][8].
## Thinking Styles
- If individuals with high schizophrenia polygenic risk do not develop non-affective psychosis, they are more likely to exhibit elevated levels of "magical thinking" (beliefs in telepathy, miracles, etc.) in adulthood, especially in middle age [1]. This may represent a milder form of deviant thinking related to genetic psychosis risk.
- Schizophrenia polygenic risk is associated with poorer spatial visualization skills, suggesting potential differences in visuospatial thinking abilities [6].
In summary, while not directly causing schizophrenia, a higher burden of schizophrenia risk alleles appears to predispose individuals to subtle cognitive deficits and differences in thinking styles, such as magical beliefs and visuospatial difficulties, even in the absence of psychosis [1][3][6][8]. These findings suggest schizophrenia's genetic liability may manifest as neurodevelopmental impairments before illness onset.
[1][2][3][6][8][14]
Citations:
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01581-z
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074036/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0920996422001864
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10730422/
[5] https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/46/2/336/5519548
[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6351778/
[7] https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18010075
[8] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2795508
[9] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41537-024-00453-5
[10] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366%2816%2930406-0/fulltext
[11] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-023-01949-9
[12] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S0920996422001864
[13] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10315436/
[14] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-018-0124-8
[15] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-024-02910-2
[16] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/abs/cognitive-performances-across-individuals-at-high-genetic-risk-for-schizophrenia-high-genetic-risk-for-bipolar-disorder-and-low-genetic-risks-a-combined-polygenic-risk-score-approach/BB49BCFB5925B962C1B3BAF525A76B62
[17] https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/two-large-studies-reveal-genes-and-genome-regions-influence-schizophrenia-risk
[18] https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/what-causes-schizophrenia
Oops. I forgot that Perplexity's most useful outputs often come in the follow-up question rounds.
Perplexity: Based on the provided sources, there is evidence suggesting that individuals with higher polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia tend to exhibit higher levels of creativity compared to the general population. Here are the key findings from the sources:
1. **Genetic Link Between Schizophrenia and Creativity**:
- Several studies have found a significant genetic overlap between schizophrenia and creativity. For instance, polygenic risk scores (PRS) for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have been shown to predict membership in artistic societies or creative professions in both Icelandic and replication cohorts. This indicates that creativity and psychosis share genetic roots [2][4][6][7][8].
2. **Specific Studies and Findings**:
- A study published in *Nature Neuroscience* found that genetic risk scores for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were significantly higher in individuals defined as creative (e.g., members of national artistic societies) compared to the general population. The scores were approximately halfway between the general population and those with the disorders themselves, suggesting a direct influence of genetic factors on creativity [4].
- Another study conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) and found a positive genetic overlap between creativity and schizophrenia. This study used PRS analyses and confirmed that higher creativity was partially explained by common genetic variations that also contribute to psychiatric disorders [3][5].
3. **Mechanisms and Implications**:
- The shared genetic basis between creativity and psychiatric disorders may involve overlapping cognitive processes and brain functional connectivity. For example, altered brain connectivity, which is involved in creativity, has also been found in schizophrenia and depression [3].
- The findings suggest that creative individuals may have a genetic predisposition towards thinking differently, which, when combined with other biological or environmental factors, could lead to mental illness [4].
In summary, the evidence supports the notion that people with higher polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia tend to be more creative than the general population. This relationship is likely due to shared genetic factors that influence both creativity and susceptibility to psychiatric disorders [2][3][4][6][7][8].
Citations:
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6792478/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26053403/
[3] https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/46/5/1317/5781181
[4] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/archive/news/ioppn/records/2015/june/schizophrenia-and-bipolar-disorder-may-share-genetic-roots-with-creativity
[5] https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article-abstract/46/5/1317/5781181
[6] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277889916_Polygenic_risk_scores_for_schizophrenia_and_bipolar_disorder_predict_creativity
[7] https://nature.com/articles/nn.4040.epdf
[8] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Polygenic-risk-scores-for-schizophrenia-and-bipolar-Power-Steinberg/2c0c049302588ceb1ba22c319de6226b2b7aea54
So is the journalist's question incoherent and impossible to answer except as to deflect a gotcha?
It's an invitation to walk into no-man's land.
> (as the old saying goes, everyone has someone who’s better than them and someone who’s worse than them, with two exceptions. And any system where only one person in the world is allowed to feel good about themselves at a time is a bad system.)
Well, that's only true if you force everyone into a complete order.
Scott and 'Lance' are actually exceptions, for most pairs of people, it's not clear who would be 'better'.
I disagree. For most pairs of people, we can absolutely decide who is better and the cases where we can't are the exceptions. I think triaging for ventilators on the COVID ward made this clear.
Triage isn't about your quality as a person, it's about your likelihood of survival with or without treatment, and if we're really desperate then it's about how many QALYs you have left. Triage very explicitly ignores questions like how smart you are and what you do for a living.
Thanks, that's what I wanted to write, too.
Basically, yes, it's easy to compare people on some axes, like height or weight or for triage. But it's much rarer to have pairs like 'Lance' and Scott where Lance is better on almost all axes, instead of the more usual: better on some and worse on others, and perhaps better on some reasonable weighted averages.
I’ll agree that there is no abstract sense in which someone is better in all situations. But there certainly are situations where someone is better in **this situation**. Even if **this situation** is “contributes to society”.
> I’ll agree that there is no abstract sense in which someone is better in all situations.
Oh, I think we might disagree there. I think there are some pairs of people where one is 'better' than the other in that sense. I just thing those pairs are rare.
Isn't counting someone's QALYs just another way of deciding who is better?
And should rich people (who are rich because they are good at physics or football) be able to go to the clinic next door to get their ventilator?
That is an assumption of its own (one I agree with, mind you), but triage during COVID did (or at least it was suggest that they should) take positions on other, highly-politically-charged questions: vaccination status, race, occupation, etc.
This seems more a post about language and social etiquette than anything else. If you accept some people have better genes than others (in the sense of more conducive to health, intelligence or whatever other qualities we think are good), then yes some people are genetically better or worse than others. We don't say this directly because it's at best rude, and at worst an indication of taboo politics. But we're talking about different things that language is doing here.
the text of this article could be replaced with a yes_chad.jpg.
Scott, you're a transhumanist. Remember what that means? "We want to live forever in perfect health and absolute morphological freedom, optimally also in total post-scarcity." And because we're not evil, append "for, at the absolute least, every human".
(inb4 "define 'human'": one, for the hypothetical anyone asking that question, "everybody who doesn't put up that gotcha", two, s0ph1a's Lower Bound is "one dyson swarm made of computronium instantiating its own version of paradise, to every living thing".)
hell, i have a whole section of my tumblr about this. under the tags "glorious transhuman future" and "bioconservative cishumanism is a self-solving problem".
actually here's my position pasted directly from there:
this is not a problem that can't be solved by the method of “open free genehacking clinics on every street corner” where “free” means “it costs zero” and “anyone can enter there and ask for a genetic mod that their geneline will carry henceforth, selected on a catalog of every trait we know how to mod or do iterated embryo selection for”
inb4 “but not everybody would want to use them and then the people who haven’t been genehacked will be unfairly disadvantaged”: oh, so you want Fairness? ok, then sterilize everyone so that nobody will make kids without having thought at least once in their life about making kids or had an opportunity to choose which traits their kids will have
inb4 “but then it will become necessary to have certain genehacks to access certain things” yeah so? right now it is necessary to have certain partially-genetically-determined capabilities to do things, too; at least this scheme permits choosing
inb4 “but then there won’t be disabled people anymore”: Deaf people often want their kids to be Deaf. aspie people often want their kids to be aspie. there are even people who want kids with Down’s, and when i say EVERY TRAIT we know how to mod, I MEAN IT
inb4 “making fertility opt-in would enrage the trads who want people who fuck to be punished with kids they don’t want”: that is a feature, not a bug
inb4 “introducing a trivial inconvenience to fertility would prevent so much births that there wouldn’t be enough people to support the olds”: i’m counting on there being enough people who’d choose to mod for additional intelligence that they’d make fully automated luxury gay space communism happen
any other objection?
This was delightful. I'd sign up to live in this sci-fi utopia.
"inb4 “making fertility opt-in would enrage the trads who want people who fuck to be punished with kids they don’t want”: that is a feature, not a bug"
I would not choose to live in your future, which pleases both of us: you, because you won't be disturbed by having to share the world with a 'trad' and me because I won't have to live beside someone who uses "inb4".
EDIT: More broadly, it seems a very deterministic world, not really one of liberty and be what you will.
“anyone can enter there and ask for a genetic mod that their geneline will carry henceforth, selected on a catalog of every trait we know how to mod or do iterated embryo selection for”
So, suppose Me In That World makes the decision that I want all my descendants to be, ugh, despicable basket of deplorables "trads" and I fix my germline so that the traits I consider desirable are carried forward. Well, maybe my grandkids decide they hate their lives and want to change it all, so they go and mod their germlines. Curses, foiled again!
Or am I? At the very least, I've determined that two generations will hold the values I consider desirable. Even if the grandkids want to break the chain for their children, they themselves can't change what happened to them. And maybe I can make it so that the mods stick; so that the mindset of the descendants will be such they will never dream of rebelling against what I chose for them, in perpetuity, fixed in the germline.
At least by the messy conventional way, there is always the chance of change, of a new roll of the dice throwing up unexpected results. I don't know Sophia's family background, but what if four generations back the great-grandparents had a chance to set the traits they deemed desirable in their descendants? Would they have selected "I want a good, obedient girl who will grow up to be a wife and mother, go to church, and live a respectable, conventional life"? Those were the kind of traits deemed desirable back then.
We're choosing based on what we want, not on what our descendants may want or need, and forgetting that children have minds and wills and desires of their own.
> I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”?
The mental model of lance that you created in the reader has lance insisting that you take the parachute because Lance is just that kind of guy that will sacrifice his life to save a stranger. 😆
No, he'd give up the parachute because that's the right thing to do, but he wouldn't be at risk from not having one. He has no way to sacrifice his life for someone else.
I dunno, the mental model of "Lance" created in my mind, involves making love to his best friend's wife, and not in an open polyamorous way, either.
Guy Gavriel Kay turns it into open polyamory in his Arthurian fantasy.
It's been a while, was that Fionavar?
Yes.
I think the answer is to say that you have "equal value as human beings" in an important non-spooky way, even though, in forced choice dilemmas where a judge should save you or Lance, they should save Lance.
In such dilemmas, they should save Lance for instrumental reasons, even though you both have equal value as human beings. It's not because he deserves better treatment than Scott. Both of you individually deserve to be saved (as captured by your equal moral value as humans). But better consequences will result from saving the smarter, funnier etc. person (all things which are only contingently instrumentally valuable).
A few thoughts:
* Better and worse should always refer to a specific activity. Taller, for example, is a physical quality but not an inherently better or worse one;
* Smarter is a grab bag that encompasses almost too much to be helpful. We can sit and endlessly decompose it until it basically disappears. And yet upon returning to the real world, no one really doubts it that someone people are just plain smarter than others;
* Few doubt the existence of better and worse in any number of areas. And that implies a possibility of quantification. And that often leads to results that feel disappointing in practice. But often far from totally useless;
* These arguments generally lead to scenarios positing a sort of God’s Eye view, and wondering what that would mean. If you could truly measure the absolute worth of two people, and you found yourself in a situation where you were forced to choose who would live… You can avoid playing the game and appear obtuse. But being too eager to play often makes people uncomfortable as it appears that you are trying to prepare the ground for something terrible;
* People that I’d refer to as ‘messaging elites’ shut down conversation. But give parents the ability to design their babies and you’d learn what people really think;
* Designer babies could drive to extinction any of the various groups that claim to be ‘born this way’.
This analysis should be more explicitly stated as being a *utilitarian* analysis. In those terms it's very clear: people can be inferior to others in terms of the practical consequences of their lives on the world, it can be right to take this into account in moral decisions, but we should avoid being entirely truthful (or at least clear) about this because of the consequences of such truth on society.
Other moral theories will yield different analyses.
Everything Scott writes, except possibly his review of What We Owe The Future, is a utilitarian analysis.
I appreciate clarity but likely he assumes his readers already anticipate that, so he skips the throat-clearing and introduction.
Perhaps another angle to approach this from is the reverse. Not to ask if you would like to be cured from something, but to ask, "if you don't have it, would you like to get it?"
"You don't have alzheimer's. Here is a medication that will give you alzheimer's. Would you like to take it?"
"You don't have cystic fibrosis. Would you like some medication that gives you cystic fibrosis?"
I'm pretty confident that anyone will answer, "no" to these.
"You have an IQ of 100. Here is a medication that will give you +20 IQ points. Would you like to have it?"
"You have a BMI of 35. Would you like some medication that will take your BMI into a normal range, without any change to diet or exercise?"
I'm also pretty sure a lot of people will say "yes" to these.
The argument is of course that if you are given an ability to add something, then to some additions people will say yes and to some others people say no. This by itself can be used to determine what should be considered "good" and what is "bad".
Something like this is correct, the snag is we all develop a picture of Who We Are, and big life changes that challenge this picture are stressful, including positive changes. So whereas I wouldn't choose cystic fibrosis, I may refuse an uptick in IQ. It would totally alter the balance of power in my personal relationships. Of course it's different choosing characteristics for the next generation who have no mental picture of themselves yet.
"You have a BMI of 35. Would you like some medication that will take your BMI into a normal range, without any change to diet or exercise?"
Given the popularity of Ozempic/Wegovy, I think that one has already been answered. We'd all like a magic pill to make us smarter, thinner and more attractive without putting in any effort.
But can we have a magic pill that makes all our children above average?
But it is only available in Lake Wobegon... :-)
In the spirit of your "giving up 70% of the way through the hyperstitious slur cascade" post, it seems pragmatic to just treat "genetically inferior/superior" as minor but old and well-established slurs, and avoid them in favor of more or less synonymous words like "genetically advantaged/disadvantaged" or something. I think those seem a little less ripe for misunderstanding, and much less ripe for bad actors seeking controversy.
In a calm conversation, I expect most people would agree that many genetic conditions reduce quality of life, and that it would be preferable not to have those conditions if they were able to choose without any risk or side effects.
Put it this way: I believe it's illegal in the UK for IVF couples to select embryos with a genetic abnormality if embryos without it are available. And this was the same government that introduced the Equality Act and so on. Also the UK courts ruled against some people with Down's Syndrome who were challenging the right to abort children with Down's. So apparently there is some space for messiness here.
I think a lot of the weirdness around this subject comes around to the question of identity, and whether our genes are a thing we *have* or a thing we *are*. "Lance *has* better genes than Scott" doesn't sound too offensive, "Lance *is* genetically superior to Scott" sounds horrible. You could even go for "Lance has more genetic privilege than Scott".
Are your genes a thing you have or a thing you are? If you had better genes, would you still be you? It's not a question with a sensible answer.
Do I wish I had better genes? Sure. Do I wish that I'd never been born and a sibling with slightly better genes (a different egg-sperm combo) had been born in my place? Hell no. Are these questions actually different?
I like "I was originally built by my genes, but now I'm in charge."
Agreed. And there is vastly more information in the details of our central nervous systems than there was and is in our genes. Not precisely equivalent to "in our memories", but close...
My recollection of the theory around cystic fibrosis was one copy of the gene (not enough to give you cystic fibrosis, it's recessive) gave you thicker mucus and protected against bacterial diarrhea, which used to be a much bigger killer than it is now. Kind of like sickle cell and malaria.
I think the current theory is tuberculosis resistance likely via some crazy bankshot biochemistry involving lower levels of arylsulfatase B. TB resistance matches the epidemiology of CFTR mutations better than cholera and the less CFTR --> less cAMP-induced chloride secretion --> less diarrhea theory, while superficially compelling, doesn't really bear out in studies
TB resistance not particularly helpful if you have full-on CF, in fact in CF there's a pretty high frequency of non-tuberculosis mycobacterial infections that are really really really bad, so this doesn't relate to the post at all, but it's interesting!
Thanks. I was wondering about that. I figured it was some heterozygote advantage like malaria or Gaucher's.
The thing is, human politics doesn't really do the sane version of this "inequality".
The sane (idealized utilitarian) version looks like "people in group A are on average 5% more morally valuable than people in group B, so we should include that term when deciding how to solve trolley problems. Of course, clear trolley problems are rare in real life. So this doesn't matter much"
When people are arguing that group A are more valuable than group B, usually it's Nazi thinking. "group B are evil scum, kill them all".
So "treat all humans as if they were equal" is ethics advice that will protect against some of the worst humans have done to each other across history. And in return, will get you slightly wrong answers in a few situations where the numbers are close anyway.
It's not advice a superintelligence would use. But given the crudeness and biases of human thought, it is a good heuristic at our level.
When it comes to discussions of genetic screens driving embryo selection, which is the majority of the eugenics-adjacent conversation here, the relevant question is surely "if my parents had a choice between having me or Lance, would/should they have picked Lance?" You cover a number of things "inferior" could mean, but not this one.
I think you totally miss the point.
It's (usually) not harmful acknowledging others are superior. As soon as you start thinking of people as inferior, and start to draw conclusions from this, it gets nasty. You acknowledging Lance is better in every possible way and should get the parachute is fine. *Him* deciding that he is better in every possible way and making that decision (and maybe using force to implement his decision) is not fine. He could, for example, be a brute, physically stronger than you, but not smarter - and you'd still end up dead, and he'd end up alive.
Thinking of groups of people as inferior is genuinely *bad*. It's not about journalists tricking you, it's about preventing something harmful to society. The large majority of us are *not* high decouplers. Once we start thinking of some group of people (to keep with your example, sufferers from Cystic Fibrosis) as inferior, that will have consequences on how we treat them.
>He could, for example, be a brute, physically stronger than you, but not smarter - and you'd still end up dead, and he'd end up alive.
>Thinking of groups of people as inferior is genuinely *bad*. It's not about journalists tricking you, it's about preventing something harmful to society.
I absolutely agree that thinking of people as inferior is genuinely bad. But Lance using strength to determine worth is no less problematic than Scott using “smarts” to determine worth. Strong people are no less entitled to a strength-based society in which they could thrive than smart people are to a smarts-based one. Currently, we have a smarts-based one and that is causing enormous problems for the majority of people in the world who are not particularly smart.
I think the opposite fear is overcompensation of the fear of dehumanization, which is also fair.
We should seek to produce more parachutes, and if that means accepting some groups are more instrumental to that goal than others, then we should recognize this reality without fear of dehumanizing anyone.
While I was generally nodding along to the parachute observation and would give the last parachute to someone more competent than me at a wide variety of topics (I would say "gladly", but I'm pretty sure I'd be terrified out of my mind; still there is something that the word "gladly" captures that feels true), I would feel really bad really fast if someone else made the parachute decision and gave it to *me*. Basically the equivalent of a mental blue screen of death, yet if I'm on the plane with one of my friends, actually remarkably likely?! Ugh. I suspect we'd both crash while arguing about who gets the parachute (or get close to it, anyway; at some point some kind of instinct would take over and I don't know what that would do).
For me, personally, one of the top criteria is "who already has kids", in that I wouldn't want to create orphans.
I would say that you and Lance have equal moral worth in the abstract. That is, excepting if it messes with Lance's charity work or something, it's equally bad for you or Lance to suffer.
Thanks for documenting another way in which malicious people take an innocuous idea and twist it around into an excuse to make you look like a bad person. The more people are aware of these dirty tricks, the less hold they'll have on our society.
I mean, speaking as someone who is an amputee due to a birth defect, I'm fine with saying my genetics could be better, and would be fine applying this same thinking process to others. This seems objectively true.
What doesn't seem true, but is implied/suggested by the discussion in the post, is that "genetically inferior == inferior". Surely what someone does with the (genetic and other) endowments they've been given at birth, matters for how we should judge their worth as a person?
If so, in the same way, it's possible to be scornful of a rich person who wastes it all, and praise someone who uses every one of the few dollars at their disposal in a good way, even though objectively that doesn't achieve much, and kinda be lukewarm about the rare person who starts off a billionaire and gives a few hundred million over their lifetime to charities that save thousands of lives, because yes that's good but they didn't have to put in much effort to accomplish it, did they?
Back to genetics: it's not just your endowment in the genetic lottery that ought to matter in how you think of yourself and how others think of you. what you do with it matters, and the judgement should be linked to how well you did given the hand you were dealt. This is not incompatible with wanting everyone to be dealt better hands in future, so that doing absolutely great things is easier for future people.
"Another possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying? It’s a claim about the US legal system. “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases.” Why am I supposed to feel cosmically reassured by this decision?"
That's all that was ever claimed for the proposition "all men are equal".
It is a vast advance over the norm in human history that some have more rights than others. It is unsatisfying because it's been true for long enough that you think "Is that all there is?"
But it is becoming less true, as privilege worms its way back into the law.
<i>That's all that was ever claimed for the proposition "all men are equal".</i>
Erm, no? The traditional liberal claim is indeed that all men are inherently equal, that equality under the law is a recognition of this fact, and that legal privilege is bad because it contradicts mankind's basic equality.
And that claim was rooted in Christian ideas of humans having equal dignity (because all humans are made in the image of God) and equal moral value (because God loves all humans).
We are all genetically inferior to healthy humans as defined by the World Health Organization - and to our transhuman and posthuman descendants. Today, rare cases of so-called “elective disability” do exist: deaf parents who want deaf children. But no depressive prospective parent wants depressive children; and no-one with a chronic pain disorder wants pain-ridden kids.
In my view, genome reform is vital for a civilized biosphere. And I think it’s easier to “sell” genome reform in the language of remediation rather than enhancement. For sure, the language of remediation risks making some people feel genetically inferior. But talk of enhancement risks triggering the “e” word - which soon shuts down intelligent debate.
[Another thorny issue is intelligence - as currently defined. Genetically ratcheting up “IQ” will almost certainly ratchet up “AQ” too. Prospective parents seeking high-IQ kids probably aren't considering where they want their future offspring to fall on the Spectrum. But what AQ is optimal for the individual and society as a whole?]
"our transhuman and posthuman descendants"
*cocks a sceptical eyebrow* If some hypothetical putative future Talkie Toaster thinks I'm its great-to-the-nth grandma, I don't want to be the forebear of anything that stupid and I don't accept it as my grandkid.
I confess I had in mind super-sentient full-spectrum superintelligences rather than a Talkie Toaster. But as long as the entity in question can't suffer, I'm fairly relaxed about the details.
My position on this is crass, crude, bigoted, and fixed around the time of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, where online discussion was hyperventilating about the treatment of the Cylons.
My position was, and remains, "You are a Talkie Toaster. I don't consider you a person, no matter how sophisticated the machinery, and have no ethical, moral or legal qualms about 'you tell me the info I need or I pull the plug on you', so decide which you want" 😁
Funnily enough, for the *original* Cylons I had more nuance on "are they indeed independent sentient entities?" but since the new version appeared to be there just as "hot chicks to be fantasy material for the fanboys" (at least the little I saw of the reboot before I ditched it), nah - Talkie Toasters!
Superiority-as-such can feel like something we definitely have because of the salience of status hierarchies, but it only has narrow context validity (superiority at something, for something).
Behold! The only people who are genetically and/or humanistically inferior are those who spend their time and energy deliberately trying to push other people down the status hierarchy
Behold! I did not deliberately push anyone down the status hierarchy. If you decide that this comment applies to you, that is between you and your conscience.
So, pretty much everyone then?
Behold! You need a better set of friends
I'm surprised you think it's pretty much everyone. I suppose I'm grateful I've found circles of friends who lift each other up all the time to the point where I almost took it for granted.
Scott's doing the same thing with his disdain of journalists and the left in general, and as someone else pointed out, the original comment is doing it as well. Not that I think less of them for it, mind you. Status heirarchies will exist no matter how much you try to ignore them. It's generally preferable to be near the top.
It seems to be that this is about identity, in the sense of "If X was different, would you be the same person?" If you have cystic fibrosis you can probably imagine what it's like without it - like a particularly good day, but better - and wouldn't say it's part of your identity. Whereas there are many deaf people who regard deafness as part of their identity because if they hadn't been deaf, they would not have been part of the deaf culture which is part of their identity (apologies if I'm not expressing that correctly - I'm not deaf). A particularly interesting case is trans, where I imagine a trans person might answer the following questions differently: "would you prefer to have been born with a body matching your brain" and "would you prefer to have been born with a brain matching your body" - because in the latter case they might think of this being a different person, whereas in the former case they might not.
I get the sense that society is still exploring the ethics of how much parents should influence their children's identity and indeed how much society should be able to influence the identity of its members. Because, while currently it is in vogue to believe that identity is yours to choose alone, this only works if you are in fact quite restrictive in what you consider part of your identity. Identity shares a lot with reputation, in that things that many people consider part of their identity (how attractive or pretty or they are, for example) are actually in the eye of the beholder.
Most people at some in their lives go through a grieving process when something that they consider part of their identity is no longer true (eg, that they are young).
On another note, while I get the aspirational sense of the title, objectively it is false - particularly if you are a child. We are social animals and I think it's a rare individual who can completely ignore the sense of status that is signalled by the people around them, especially if it's a signal from the majority. Even if they can do so on an intellectual level. Rather like "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt". People need some outside support to be able to disregard negative signals completely. Not everyone has this.
>It seems to be that this is about identity, in the sense of "If X was different, would you be the same person?" If you have cystic fibrosis you can probably imagine what it's like without it - like a particularly good day, but better - and wouldn't say it's part of your identity.
Agreed, but there are additional Xs that are non-genetic with similar effects:
"If one had majored in X2 rather than in X1, would one be the same person?"
"If one's first job had been job2 rather than job1, would one be the same person?"
I will add that inferiority and superiority about capacities is different from what normally is meant in human societies. Depending on society, inferior people have worse politics (America), worse bloodline (India / Wizarding World), worse chance at salvation (JWs, Nation of Islam), lower dignity (Nazism / Ebenezer Scrooge /antebellum Southern culture and after). The inferiority has little to nothing to do with individual capacities and entitles others to treat them unkindly. Don't be an asshole (to others or your own soul) is an important category that people have to be reminded of shockingly often.
Isn’t “you aren’t worse than anyone” a pure value claim? How can a value claim be wrong? If it’s the case that we are always computing our position in a status hierarchy, isn’t “you aren’t worse than anyone” simply a value claim “you aren’t low status”?
You seem to be making the mistake of trying to interpret a value claim on a factual basis. The woke canceler types clearly don’t accept Hume’s fork as real and an important (valuable?) precept for rational thought.
I don’t see how a person can reason about their values and work out contradictions between them unless they have some framework by which values are real. In the absence of an explicit framework for thinking, why would you get anything other than emotionally loaded contradictions?
This strikes at the heart of the Enlightenment notion of equality. Equality isn't a physical claim, but a metaphysical one. We are not equal in height, weight, or ability, but we were born equal in dignity and in moral worth. The notion of equality at birth, just like Hammurabi's notion that slaves are worth a fraction of freemen and "intermediate persons" are worth something in between, has no basis in physical reality--but it's created a far more just, peaceful, stable, and prosperous world than the various doctrines of inequality ever have.
Reminiscent of the professors mocking undergraduate students because a majority of them think they're above average... drivers, say; thing is, the students are right and the professors are dumb, it's an ill-formed question.
Mary has a map of the city in her head. Paul has never gotten a ticket. John can beat the Google Maps time estimate every time. Jacqueline is faultlessly polite at merges... They are all correct: they are above average at the metrics which matter to them. Since the professor didn't specify metrics, to argue that they are mistaken you first have to establish that the professor... polite word... erred.
Interesting post, but I think casting the second question as a trap runs some fairly obvious risks. Namely, if you are actually sliding down the road to being a Nazi, we'll, you're never going to confront it.
No one can make you feel inferior, but you can surely as fuck make yourself feel superior and label everyone else as inferior in your head.
There are good reasons not to have a society with definite genetic ranking.
There would be all sorts of efforts and cheating to game the standards.
What's worse, there would be constant resource-sucking fighting over who's entitled to what.
While a lot of societies have fights over status, at least some of it is about groups rather than individuals, which permits a little work to get done.
I think 'inferior' necessarily implies a comparison. But if I am enjoying life I don't see how I can compare myself to Lance on that metric. Lance doesn't enjoy being me more than I do! So on the important question of the parachute and the plane I am making a grab for it. I am the best at enjoying my own life! Sorry Lance but glad you are so great you let me have the parachute.
I feel like you’re ignoring the fact that inferior means subordinate. Saying you’re not inferior, also means you’re not a 2nd class citizen, it means that no other is your master without your consent, it means you aren’t inherently low-status & have class mobility. Not being inferior is the foundation of your freedom & democracy.
Saying you are genetically inferior is different than saying you are genetically worse off because inferior is a word tangled with power dynamics & worse off isn’t.
I think you're downplaying the importance of equal before the law. Historically, this was obviously abnormal, with many societies having explicit classes of people who received vastly different treatment from their respective legal systems. Everything from different rules about who can do what, limitations on who you can marry or what jobs you can do, different levels of punishment for the same crimes, no prosecution for favored people/groups, and literal slavery for disfavored groups.
To me, it's one of the biggest and most important aspects of Western society - equality before the law. This is not something we should take for granted or downplay.
It's also, to me, one of the biggest aspects of saying that someone isn't inferior to someone else.
Sure, we might say that Lance should get the parachute (or organ transplant, or whatever) if we were forced to pick, but notably Lance could not force that decision. Someone else could get it, if they wanted. If someone else also wants it, we go through the legal system and Lance doesn't get priority just because he's smarter or richer or whatever.
> Historically, this was obviously abnormal, with many societies having explicit classes of people who received vastly different treatment from their respective legal systems.
That's what we have now.
Yes and no. I thought of the inequities we have in current society, and agree that they exist and can be problematic. Lots of low level "I can afford a decent attorney" even without the true effects of being rich and powerful enough to distort who even gets prosecuted in the first place.
But, compared to historic situations, it's not even close. Kings used to be able to rape and murder in public with zero consequences. So could their friends, powerful merchants, clergy, whoever had enough power. And there were rarely if ever checks and balances that would value the non-powerful or give them a reasonable avenue to appeal. They could try to find someone powerful to take up their cause, but nothing required the powerful to even pretend to listen, let alone make any changes.
> Kings used to be able to rape and murder in public with zero consequences. So could their friends, powerful merchants, clergy, whoever had enough power.
This is a pretty shocking misunderstanding of the past. It's a caricature that exists solely for the purpose of congratulating yourself on being better than a culture you clearly aren't familiar with. Good work!
You really don't think 𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 had cause to be concerned over their public image?
This is going to depend a lot on specifics, but do you deny that a non-trivial number of kings were able to do that with impunity? Clearly not every king could, and sometimes they would overstep and get assassinated or made to capitulate and sign away their power.
Did Genghis Khan have the power I describe? Attila the Hun? Nero? Pope John XII?
It's hard to argue that [at least some] historic kings acted above the law. It's also hard to argue that what happens currently is systematically and substantially less than used to happen in the past - at pretty much every pre-modern country and time. The few exceptions seem to prove the rule, if any truly exist.
Genghis Khan didn't even have the power to disown his wife's bastard, something that would have been automatic for pretty much any king with much less power than he had.
Kings are free to have some people killed. They are sharply circumscribed in how they use that power. Everything a king ever does has consequences for the king. No one has ever had the power you describe.
> Clearly not every king could, and sometimes they would overstep and get assassinated or made to capitulate and sign away their power.
This is just a statement that kings did not possess the power you describe. Everything they do increases or detracts from their legitimacy, and if it drops too low, they get deposed. That a particular king navigated this balance without being deposed doesn't mean he wasn't constrained by it.
One thing we can tell with certainty from the historical record is that popular legitimacy was one of the foremost concerns of 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 king, no matter the time, no matter the place.
The modern position of the Chinese Communist Party is that the imperial system was bad because the emperor's power was unconstrained. I have a friend who has repeated that slogan to me several times.
I asked her once about an imperial decree that I'd heard of, issued by the Empress Cixi and banning the elite practice of foot binding. She reported back that Cixi really had issued that decree, but there was no effect. When I asked how this was compatible with the idea that the emperor's power was unconstrained, she said "you don't understand. Nobody would have followed that order."
You might find the new book Basic Equality (Princeton University Press) helpful on this stuff.
Ok I confess, I wrote it
"I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything."
What? No, actually, I am my own first priority, and I expect that to be true for any reasonable person.
I personally don't have much trouble simply answering "yes" to "am I inferior to Lance?"; I don't put very much stake in my ability to roll a 1 on the first throw of an 8-billion-sided die.
But of course "Lance" isn't real, he's an extremely contrived rhetorical device. I personally have never met anyone who's even comparable, let alone clearly superior to me in anything but a niche of a niche of my life. It's one thing to get depressed over something that is actually real, but you'll seriously trouble yourself if you let yourself get depressed over things that are merely conceivable!
A politician proposes banning embryo selection because its Nazi eugenics and no embryo is inferior to any other embryo.
Do you bite the bullet and say there are superior embryos and people have the right to select them?
Here's another perspective: if being inferior to Lance makes you depressed, should you want Lance to be 'worse'?
Taking it further: how wonderful would it be to become the 'worst' person in the world while staying exactly as you are?
I don't understand how people benefit from reading a statement to the universal "you." The writer isn't talking to *YOU,* the individual. They don't know *YOU.* It's not for *YOU.*
It's for everyone, which means it's for no one. Certainly not for *YOU.*
Jason Paragin's argument that "you probably suck and you'll have to accept that and something about it if you want to stop sucking" is both accurate *and*, in my opinion, infinitely more useful than broadly assuring everyone-and-no-one-in-particular of their own worthiness:
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person
Whoa, I noticed his pseudonym, and he's the same guy who wrote this, way back when:
https://web.archive.org/web/20071107135221/http://www.cracked.com:80/article_15660_ultimate-war-simulation-game.html
I think of that almost every time I read war reporting.
I've been a fan of his since John Dies at the End was just a random series of posts in a message board (and I bought a hardcopy of the vanity print!).
Oh, huh, I tried reading that back in those days, but never got into it. I didn't realize it was the same guy, or I might have pushed longer. Maybe I should try it again.
Fiction very much depends on independent taste. John Dies at the End is amongst the funniest books I've ever read (if not THE funniest; I'm struggling to think of a funnier one) *and* it's amongst the most existentially thought-provoking / disturbing.
If you're not into its particular brand of humor, it's not going to work.
There is a process of determining whether genes are beneficial or not. It is called natural selection. The only objective measure of the value of a gene is the degree to which it makes it more likely that the other genes in the genome will survive and be passed on. Genes that are "bad" get weeded out over the long term, no matter how admirable the carriers may appear to be in many ways. If a gene is not successful in propagating itself it is a "bad" gene.
Saying that an entire genome is superior or inferior to any other is to imply that all genomes - and therefore people - can be ranked in a hierarchy, with the person with the best genome at the top and the person with the worst at number 8,103,247,006.. This is ridiculous, even in theory. At this point we usually can't even reliably determine the relative fitness value of individual genes, much less an entire genome. It may be that in the future a gene that we consider bad - say it shortens life - will turn out to confer immunity against a plague that wipes out the rest of humanity. Surely that would mean carriers of that gene were genetically "superior," right? Yet it would be kind of stupid to say that, wouldn't it?
It seems there is confusion between the concepts of genetic inferiority and moral worth. I'd say possessing homozygous cystic fibrosis genes is genetic inferiority, and I shall prove it thus: if it is not inferior you will not mind if I conduct some gene therapy on you and give you cystic fibrosis. Is that the case, or would you run a mile from me? Hold still now, you told me it isn't "inferior"!
So:
Yes, cystic fibrosis is a bad thing to have.
Yes, it makes you genetically inferior in the sense it is undesirable.
And the question you missed out:
No, it does not make you morally inferior, ie worth less as a person.
I'm seeing the same confusion in matters of equity of outcome. Individuals are different, with differing abilities along various axes. There is no reason in the world to expect equal outcomes for all, but we always lived with that by agreeing that all are equal in moral worth, that all lives are equally valuable. By what simplistic calculus do we now ignore that and declare that human differences are intolerable?
I think to give a better answer to the (innter) journalist one would first have to define the concept of inferiority more clearly. It seems to me that on the one hand there is an instrumental meaning of the word. The average human is for example a worse tool for hammering a nail than ... well ... a hammer.
But the sense of inferiority the journalist is appealing to in their question about one (human) being being inferior to another is about a categorical ordering among (human) beings. I think one quite defensible answer is to reply "no" since such an ordering simply does not exist (or, if you are Strawsonian about predicates assigned to non-existing entities, you may answer that the question is non-sensical).
Am I, e.g., categorically superior to a wolf? Is the wolf categorically superior to Pluto? Surely, it is not sufficient to point to all the ways I am instrumentally superior to the wolf or in which Pluto is instrumentally superior to me. For here we get into the paradoxes of social choice theory. Each ordering over an instrumental dimension can be thought of as a voter in trying to choose one categorical superiority ordering. According to Arrow's theorem, then there is no choice function that is Pareto-efficient and satisfies the non-dictatorship and independence of irrelevant alternatives criteria. I think it is fair to stop at this point and simply deny that a satisfactory categorical inferiority/superiority ranking of beings can be had.
If one however wants to grant the existence of such a ranking, it appears most sensible to me to give up non-dictatorship. However, one should then make a principled choice which kind of instrumental utility should determine the categorical ranking. I think any such choice is absurd.
For example, maybe you think a being's moral value should determine their place in the superiority ranking? Then under something like utilitarianism the degree of a being's capacity to cause the experience of positive or negative qualia should determine where they are in the ranking. Now, assuming that this can in principle be quantified and is knowable (a big assumption!), would you really go to an oil rig and tell it "You are infinitely inferior to me, you pile of scrap"? This seems to go completely against how we use the word "inferior". So moral value does not give rise to an ordering of categorical inferiority.
Now pick any other trait. Clearly examining that trait does not suffice to decide whether Scott or Lance should get the parachute in the example. Whether Scott or Lance should get the parachute is not determined by one of them being inferior to the other categorically, but by their moral value.
And I think there is just no big puzzle there. If Lance is a toddler, many people might intuitively want to save the child even though Scott is instrumentally superior to Lance in almost all dimensions. Is Scott therefore categorically inferior to Lance or vice-versa? If Lance is a nuclear warhead that will explode on the plane's impact and kill a million people, is parachuting it to safety an admission that somehow Scott is inferior to a nuclear warhead? If Lance has cystic fibrosis than perhaps Scott ought to get the parachute - again, this has nothing to do with Lance being categorically inferior to Scott. All of these are just normal moral dilemmata. A total inferiority ordering over beings would neither be sufficient nor necessary to resolve them.
TL;DR: One should distinguish instrumental and categorical inferiority, Arrow's impossibility theorem prevents a good definition of categorical inferiority grounded in instrumental inferiority, picking moral inferiority as dictatorship rule to determine categorical inferiority leads to absurd results, moral inferiority as one type of instrumental inferiority determines how moral dilemmata ought to be solved, a categorical inferiority ranking adds nothing to this. Hence one should just rely "no/the question is non-sensical to the (inner) journalist.
There's a passage in Leviticus 21 that describes physical requirements for a priest making offerings to God. They can't be blind, lame, mutilated, hunch-backed, a dwarf, have rashes, etc. It doesn't call out cystic fibrosis, but it's safe to assume that would be disqualifying.
Some Christians wrestle with that passage because it implies that God considers certain people to be inferior, which goes against the idea of an inclusive and compassionate God in the New Testament. It's especially jarring to our modern sensibilities where we use euphemisms like "differently-abled" to characterize qualities that most would consider inferior.
I think a more satisfying explanation (from a Christian perspective) is that if we're to be resurrected some day with a new body, we can be sure that our new body won't be blind or lame or have CF, because God recognizes that those qualities are inferior.
Maybe in Christian heaven you and Lance would be equally attractive? Or at the very least both hunch-back free.
The more reasonable explanation is that people didn't want disfigured people representing the church.
There was a traditional Irish law that a king could not be physically flawed.
The Anglo-Saxons had something similar; putting out someone's eyes would make him no longer throne-worthy.
Is this an exception to "If you strike at a king you must kill him." ?
I wouldn't say *exception* , since he wasn't king at the time, and never became king, and died shortly afterward.
But being a relative of the next(?) king, it caused a lot of bad blood that IMHO was only resolved when William the Conqueror (some sort of cousin to the strikee) defeated Harold Godwinson (son of the striker, Godwin). So...
Many Thanks! I wasn't thinking specifically of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Aetheling (Is that who you mean?), but just of the general idea that, given this test, it was possible to make a king not throne-worthy (and therefore less powerful) by blinding rather than killing him - hence a general exception to the general advice about striking at kings.
the issue with "inferior" and "superior" when discussing genetics is we often use those terms in establishing a hierarchy of obedience or submission or value, but that's not what we mean with cystic fibrosis
A lieutenant is superior to a private who is inferior. A father is superior to the daughter. The pastor is superior to the congregant. The therapist is superior to the patient, which is why if a sexual relationship starts, the therapist has abused their superior position as an authority/expert in the persons psychological life.
there is a whole religion with a confessional document that spells out the sins of superiors and inferiors in social relationships (the Presbyterian church) based on their understanding of the fifth commandment. But nobody in that church would ever apply it to cystic fibrosis (though the southern presbyterians before the civil war, sadly, tried to apply it to so-called superior and inferior races.
We evolved in a context in which cystic fibrosis very much changes one's place in all useful hierarchies. Modern notions of superior/inferior are often attempts to hide the evolved hierarchies.
I think the name for the quality this essay points out is "incoherence". If you say a thing one way, it's obvious; if you say it another way, it's a terrible crime. This is like trying to talk about square circles. How many sides do they have? Scott is chafing at having to live under an incoherent ethical system.
My diagnosis is that this incoherence comes from a fundamental paradox in the system's implicit assumptions. The conflicting assumptions are: "It makes sense to consider ethical matters from an objective standpoint" and "People aren't eternal beings". If you drill down far enough into what objectivity means and what it entails for ethical considerations, you see it's a standpoint that's only possible eternally -- that is, from outside time, to a viewer who is personally unaffected by the contingencies of history. This is the role you're pretending to take on when you compare Scott and Lance. But if Scott and Lance aren't themselves eternal beings, then their lives and fates are rendered irrelevant by the historical contingencies that, definitionally, don't affect the objective viewer. They don't have any existence outside of irrelevant historical contingencies.
I'm saying Judeo-Christian ethics without God is a square circle. You can enforce belief in square circles all you want, and everybody can go around telling each other they believe in square circles, but it's going to get awkward when someone like Scott starts asking questions about how many sides they have. That's the incoherence. Judeo-Christian ethics makes it seem bad to treat people differently just because of what genes they were born with (which makes sense if they're eternal beings and you'll all one day stand before the throne of God) -- and materialist science makes it seem wrong to lie about something as plainly obvious as certain genes just being plain bad.
I guess a faster way to say what I'm trying to say is that I think Scott is smuggling metaphysics in when he posits a friend Lance who's superior to him in every measurable way. It assumes a Measurer sitting on the throne of God, who thought-experiment Scott is pretending to be. Either that or Scott really does have a friend named Lance and they spent 5 or 10 years going through an enormous battery of every single test ever devised to compare two human beings. Which he didn't. So it's imaginary, and therefore not subject to the real historical contingencies of life, and therefore smuggling in an eternal perspective not limited by those contingencies.
And I guess it's possible, also, that Scott's willingness to say "Lance is taller / faster / stronger / smarter than me" but not "I am inferior to Lance" could represent a refusal to accept the eternal thought-experiment comparison of the inferior / superior distinction; an insistence on grounding in actual measurement rather than metaphysical quality-juggling.
> This is like trying to talk about square circles. How many sides do they have?
Four, obviously. Square circles aren't some exotic concept; circles under both the taxicab norm and the sup norm are squares.
Okay, exactly-three-sided pentagons, then. Oceanfront property in Colorado. Pick your utterance that's grammatically legal but doesn't represent an existing entity because of incorporating properties that can't coexist.
I like it directionally - my only beef is that it's a little overly passive for me in a stoicist sort of way. I don't think I've ever had an interaction in the genetic superiority/inferiority conversation where I or some neutral third party asks "is N/S inferior to Lance?" in some kind of objective way, and I have to fight my own worry about it.
My interactions (including on this board) invariably have taken the form of someone boorishly arriving in a public forum and announcing "I and people of my IQ have given society everything, and people with lower IQs than me are fit only to serve me and do manual labor!"
If this kind of behavior does cause a person to question their own self esteem, then this kind of "haha you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you make me depressed" approach makes sense, but I think it also makes sense for the public forum, upon the arrival of the boorish guy in question, to discipline him by loudly and resoundingly rejecting him socially until his behavior improves.
On the whole throne of God thing, my take is that if we could all look at every possible outcome in every possible world there’s some sort of emergent universal moral law that you can only perfectly observe from outside of time and space. Under that highest moral law, you are equal.
In some of those worlds, the dice rolls are different enough that you and Lance are effectively reversed. Maybe you stay static and he suffers some debilitating trauma as a child. He looks up to you and in some dark moments he envies your life. But you know, because you can imagine those other worlds even if you can’t inhabit them, that the situation *could* have been backwards. What you are, really, is a pattern executing across time and space. That’s the highest thing you are, definitionally, because it is what makes sense of your atoms from one moment to the next. Coalescing out of dust here, collapsing back into dust there but some eternal pattern that could self-recognize. So that eternal pattern is equal because in infinite worlds you had every chance for you to be equal or unequal in every allowable permutation.
Anyway this is nuts and I’m not even sure 100% what I mean by it. I had a whatever you want to call it experience once, and after that my take on Many Worlds is as described. The structure of reality is set up so that we all get every possible chance allowed, within the confines of us still being recognizably ourselves. The pattern itself is the highest reality.
My personal resolution to this kind of thing is to say that the reflexive desire to compare and rank things is really the heart of the problem.
Of course, it does happen that we need to draw some kind of comparison in order to make a decision. But as the example with the parachute suggests, it ... doesn't actually come up that often. It seems more like an inclination born of peoples' need to construct or evaluate a social hierarchy, or otherwise order their world. And you can decide to do less of that!
I think the plane one is before we part ways. I think there's genuinely a real-world ethical sense in which every human being deserves to live equally. Unless Lance's goodness makes his survival instrumental to saving more lives down the line, I'd say the ethical thing to do would be to flip a coin for the parachute.
I'd offer an alternative concept that we can throw in here - "dignity."
People can vary on all sorts of axes in terms of strength/weakness/social utility/etc, but still be deserving of treatment with equal dignity as a human being.
It doesn't offer much in terms of a self esteem boost - falling back on "Lance is faster and funnier and richer and stronger and better looking than me but we are of equal dignity" isn't going to insulate me from feelings of inferiority, so it doesn't solve for the "I feel low status" side of the equation, but it does help from a "setting rules and policy as a society" perspective. If a society recognizes that (A) a person with a genetic condition that prevents them from running and (B) a person who lacks that condition and can run just fine, are nevertheless possessed of equal dignity, such a society can set a reasonable standard that "being able to run" is an important qualification for being paramedic without going full nazi and asking why the person who can't run is permitted to breed (or live) in the first place.
It seems pretty clearly to be:
"Sure, okay, whatever, people can be better than other people in every measurable way and maybe there's some benefit to determining which people that is. However, historically even trying to ask that question has led to the worst decisions the human race has ever made so let's not."
That seems like the best "short version" I've heard.
"Another possible answer: fine, in every real world test we can dream up, Lance is superior to me, but there’s still some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something."
Well, we *are* all equal before the throne of God, so there you go. Lance is not more of a human or more in the image of God than you. And no matter how morally good Lance may be, all have fallen short and are in need of the grace of God. I'm fully human, you're fully human, Lance is fully human. He may be better or have more desirable qualities in a lot of ways, but he's no more human than the smelly drunk in the gutter.
I know, here is where we go on about souls and everyone rolls their eyes, but we really are faced with the problem that either we do say "X is better than Y by all these measurements so X is indeed superior to Y and should have all the rights and privileges and get the last remaining life jacket", or we agree to have double meanings as in "okay for the cystic fibrosis test we will say that X is better than Y but for the are you a Nazi test we will say there is no difference".
"Article 4. Whether the image of God is found in every man?
Objection 1. It would seem that the image of God is not found in every man. For the Apostle says that "man is the image of God, but woman is the image [Vulg. glory] of man" (1 Corinthians 11:7). Therefore, as woman is an individual of the human species, it is clear that every individual is not an image of God.
Objection 2. Further, the Apostle says (Romans 8:29): "Whom God foreknew, He also predestined to be made conformable to the image of His Son." But all men are not predestined. Therefore all men have not the conformity of image.
Objection 3. Further, likeness belongs to the nature of the image, as above explained (Article 1). But by sin man becomes unlike God. Therefore he loses the image of God.
On the contrary, It is written (Psalm 38:7): "Surely man passeth as an image."
I answer that, Since man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature, he is the most perfectly like God according to that in which he can best imitate God in his intellectual nature. Now the intellectual nature imitates God chiefly in this, that God understands and loves Himself. Wherefore we see that the image of God is in man in three ways.
First, inasmuch as man possesses a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men.
Secondly, inasmuch as man actually and habitually knows and loves God, though imperfectly; and this image consists in the conformity of grace.
Thirdly, inasmuch as man knows and loves God perfectly; and this image consists in the likeness of glory. Wherefore on the words, "The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us" (Psalm 4:7), the gloss distinguishes a threefold image of "creation," of "re-creation," and of "likeness." The first is found in all men, the second only in the just, the third only in the blessed.
Reply to Objection 1. The image of God, in its principal signification, namely the intellectual nature, is found both in man and in woman. Hence after the words, "To the image of God He created him," it is added, "Male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27). Moreover it is said "them" in the plural, as Augustine (Gen. ad lit. iii, 22) remarks, lest it should be thought that both sexes were united in one individual. But in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature. So when the Apostle had said that "man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man," he adds his reason for saying this: "For man is not of woman, but woman of man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man."
Reply to Objections 2 and 3. These reasons refer to the image consisting in the conformity of grace and glory."
> And no matter how morally good Lance may be, all have fallen short and are in need of the grace of God.
You're forgetting about Galahad.
Even Galahad needed grace, which helped him attain virtue 😁
This "image of God" stuff is emotionally very satisfying, but practically inapplicable. If there's a massive fire, and I have a chance to save either Scott or Lance but not both, then I have to make a choice. And I have to make this choice now, in this life and not the next. I could refuse to make that choice (e.g. by flipping a coin or electing to save neither person), but that is also a choice. The fact that both Scott and Lance are equal in the mind of God can help me live with the choices I'd made, but it doesn't help me *choose*.
If you have to choose between rescuing Scott and Lance, then which of them is nearer the door? Which one is easier to save? Which one is the one where there's a better chance of both of you making it out?
Unless you're in a Buridan's Ass situation, I think most people will make calculations like that. How about if Scott and Lance are on the ground floor, but there are five cute puppies on the first floor? Are you the kind of monster that picks Lance over the puppies? 😁
> Are you the kind of monster that picks Lance over the puppies?
Yes. Yes I am. Now, if they were kittens, that'd be a different story...
Anyway, choosing between rescuing Scott or Lance is obviously a contrived situation; as you say, there may be many other factors involved. Still, in life (this Earthly one, at least) we are always making these sorts of calculations. If I'm looking for a new programmer to add to my team, do I hire Scott or Lance ? If I have a box of kittens that need a home, do I give them to Scott or Lance ? Do I vote Scott or Lance for the municipal undersecretary treasurer position ?
I'm obviously not trying to provide an exhaustive list of options; rather, my point is that the idea that "all are equal in the mind of God" is completely unhelpful in making these, or in fact any other kind of choices. When rescuing people from the fire, I must judge their proximity to the door, their weight, their chances of survival if unaided, their auxiliary kittens, and yes, all other things being equal, even their expected value (if you disagree, imagine that you're choosing between Scott and Jeffrey Dahmer instead). Their equal value in the mind of God simply does not influence these decisions in any way.
"Their equal value in the mind of God simply does not influence these decisions in any way."
It does if we go "Well, I *could* have saved Scott, but who cares about that genetically inferior loser? Let him burn, better for the world all round!" even when it's not a choice between "save him or save Lance".
That's the problem underlying all the discussion here: way too often, "genetically inferior" is taken to mean "absolutely inferior and worthless and not deserving of consideration as a human".
But then the fact that both Scott and Lance are equal in the mind of God is still irrelevant, since you're not facing a choice between Scott and Lance any longer, but between Scott and... I don't know, a pineapple maybe ?
<i>I'm obviously not trying to provide an exhaustive list of options; rather, my point is that the idea that "all are equal in the mind of God" is completely unhelpful in making these, or in fact any other kind of choices.</i>
The history of the eugenics movement suggests that your answer to the question "Are all equal in the mind of God?" does sometimes have major real-world ramifications.
I'm not sure if that's true. On the one hand, the eugenics movement is primarily infamous for their totalitarian policies of e.g. forced sterilization. I think today most people would agree that such policies are incredibly destructive; but, on the other hand, if all are truly equal in the mind of God, then presumably He has no opinion on the topic one way or the other.
On the third hand, though, if there was a button that said "guarantee that your own child would be born without any horrible genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis", then I'd hold down that button as hard as I could. And if there was a knob I could turn that would make my child smarter, or stronger, or more resistant to bee stings or whatever, then I would seriously consider turning that knob (modulo any side-effects).
<i>I'm not sure if that's true. On the one hand, the eugenics movement is primarily infamous for their totalitarian policies of e.g. forced sterilization. I think today most people would agree that such policies are incredibly destructive;</i>
In the first place, the US, and most of the western world, had various eugenics laws on the book, and didn't suffer incredible destruction as a result. Of course, you could say that forcibly sterilising some classes of people is just inherently destructive, but I don't see how you can do that without holding either that all are equal in the mind of God, or some secular substitution thereof.
In the second place, about the only opposition to eugenics at the time came from religious people motivated by the belief that all are equal before God. If believing in equality before God lets you avoid incredible eugenics-related destruction, whereas everyone else has to actually go through said destruction before realising that eugenics is a bad idea, that's still a pretty major real-world ramification.
<i>but, on the other hand, if all are truly equal in the mind of God, then presumably He has no opinion on the topic one way or the other.</i>
No? If all are truly equal in the mind of God, the natural conclusion is that he doesn't want us to forcibly sterilise whole categories of people, not that he has no opinion on the matter.
You are equal to Lance in the sense that God loves you equally and Jesus died for your sins just as much as he died for Lance's. This isn't unreachable or indefinable. You can view the enduring popularity of the message that all equal in a secular society detached from its true grounding as either because the truth of Christianity is built into human nature or because we haven't yet fully shrugged off outdated superstitions according to your preference.
There's a pretty mainstream view, which I subscribe to, that God is willing to accept everyone into heaven, but some people choose of their own free will to go to hell instead. The idea is that when you sin you damage your own soul such that you're less capable of wanting goodness, even for yourself.
To love someone means to will their good as an end in itself. So, if your friend is sick and you love them, you will do what you can to help them recover, pretending that they're not sick wouldn't be an act of love. The same applies with sin: God loves the sinner, which means that he wants to help them repair the damage that they've done to their soul. It doesn't mean that he pretends that sin is fine.
By the same token, it's hardly fair that some people are locked up in prison for years while others freely participate in society and enjoy all kinds of liberty and good things.
Just because they torture-murdered fifty hookers, I mean c'mon now, is that any reason?
No, God will not think less of you as a human. As a sinner who causes harm to themselves and others, that is repugnant to God. As a human who has fallen? All can repent and be forgiven.
You see, you yourself are here categorising some lives as worthy and human, and some as unworthy and inhuman, hence it doesn't matter what we do to them - legal torture is fine, starving them to death is fine, death of a thousand cuts is fine, because they're not really properly human like Ives Parr is.
Then you had better hope that AI, if it becomes the big smart cookie people are hoping will happen, does not share your values.
Because such an entity will be able to say "I can do all that any human can do, and do it much better, and that is not even considering the things only I can do". All humans then, of whatever grade, will be the 'genetic inferiors' of the AI, so why should it bother to keep these poor suffering and, let's face it, violent and murderous apes alive? A quick merciful death, then a superior life form can inherit the light cone.
It's dangerous to talk openly about the general value of people. So society is full of mechanisms to help us steer around that topic. "We deserve equal rights" is one, and "you're a Nazi" is another. They don't hold up to examination, because value is still a real thing, but they make adequate conversation-stoppers if indeed someone wants the conversation to stop.
Direct value talk is a threat to society because it destroys the illegible hierarchy where everyone is allowed to feel valued and content. A legible hierarchy would bring us back to chimp world, where there's no peace unless everyone is perfectly happy with their rank at the same time
Direct value talk doesn’t necessitate a legible hierarchy if value is computationally intractable. If the value of a person can only been seen, say, 100 years after their death (due to sufficient time for a legacy of consequences to develop, including offspring and people influenced), then any social hierarchy is merely some hypothesis about future value.
"...some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something..."
This will obviously depend on one's religious convictions. But at least for me, the following statements about human equality don't seem "unreachable" or "indefinable":
1) All human beings are made in the image of God, and are valuable from being so made (not because of wealth, IQ, skill, or even virtue).
2) All human beings (save Christ) have sinned and require forgiveness to be reconciled to God; this forgiveness cannot be earned by good works, but is only available through faith in Christ.
You know when I first got to New York after grad school I was so damn broke that I tried to donate sperm. I went in and they saw that I was white and 6'2 and I told them I had a PhD and they were very very excited. And then they asked if I had any chronic medical conditions, and I said "haha, well, funny story, have you heard of bipolar disorder?" and that was that, I was out.
Now the weird thing for me is that, had I donated sperm and it was used to create embryos that were (let's say this was possible technologically) tested and found to pass on bipolar disorder, and those embryos were destroyed for that reason, many people would call that eugenics. But simply screening me out of the process, very few would call eugenics, even though since whatever the truth about bipolar disorder it's not mendelian, so the odds of me producing a bipolar embryo might not be that high, whereas the tested embryo we know has bipolar disorder. So, like... why is the one OK and not the other?
I don’t think most people care much, at all, about being internally consistent. Anyone who does usually ends up with all kinds of “weirdo” beliefs.
Exactly. What’s the benefit of consistency in beliefs? Does it help you make more money or more friends or more success at work? Arguably it goes against all of those. The only reason it might make sense is if “being aligned with reality” were more important to you than “success at an assortment of different goals with no underlying unity.”
Oh, I don't know. When I take those online moral/ethical tests beloved of the university departments which set up the trolley problems, I get great satisfaction out of being consistent in my beliefs all through and getting the shocked result of "You monster!" at the end.
Me: Why yes, I am going to apply Catholic social teaching principles and moral theology all the way through on your little gotcha! questions
Them: *Shocked Pikachu face* But... but.. don't you care that we're calling you a monster?
Me: Nope! In fact, that's the fun of doing these quizzes! Because if I were not consistent, you'd be smarmily informing me that I'm a hypocrite and the only way is Essex, sorry I mean, the only way is to adopt *your* moral philosophy so as to have the One Correct Answer for all conundrums ever after. Feck Judith Thomson and her dandelion seeds, *I* say!
Interesting, I guess there’s the additional work of producing the embryo? I’m not sure this is true, but I imagine they have quite a few men willing to donate sperm and can afford to be selective even if it doesn’t make sense
Because it's like the trolley problem: inaction (not selecting your sperm so not creating embryos with it) versus action (creating embryos with your sperm then destructively screening them). In the first case, no embryos are brought into existence, so there is no choosing between them as to which is "superior" and thus wins the right to develop into a pregnancy, so it's not positive eugenics.
Of course all of this hinges on the word "inferior" and I think that Scott's usage is slightly different than mine. You can of course use it to talk about quality ("Yugo is inferior to a Cadillac") but when applied to people, my immediate interpretation is about social status, especially as conferred by social structures (government, culture, etc). The dominant cultural concensus is largly egalitarian, so this usage is nearly always distasteful.
I don't think it's unreasonable or inconsistent to say "cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease and sounds much worse that not having it" and at the same time say "someone with cystic fibrosis is not geneticially inferior in the following sense: my opinion of them, and their standing in society does not (or should not) depend on their genetic disposition". In fact, I think I agree with both statements.
You're not alone Noah. I'd suggest that almost everyone would agree with both statements. And I believe they are right to do so.
The great irony of Scott's argument here is that he has bought into the very premise I think he means to disagree with. The people who argue that cystic fibrosis (or autism, or being born with one arm, or who suffer from any other condition or disability) are not "inferior people" are correct; they aren't "inferior" or in any fundamental way lesser beings. But that doesn't mean their conditions or disabilities aren't things we should try to prevent or correct.
The fact that I can't carry a tune or that I have become a portly doesn't make me an inferior person to Bono or Brad Pitt. But that doesn't mean I don't think that learning to sing or being more attractive wouldn't make me a better version of myself and that I wouldn't jump at the opportunity to make it so if it were easily possible. They are just different axes.
My friends, as genetically flawed as they are, are better than Lance because of my relationships with them. Shared time, human bonds, deep love. That's what makes me a superstar in their worlds, too. (In addition to my many fine qualities.)
I'm sure Lance has many friends!
Read Part 2: "I still think there's a deeper question here, of WHY questions about inferiority seem so compelling." I don't find these questions compelling. Why not? Relationships. The person I've known for 20 yrs is so much more interesting to me than Lance, however fabulous he is.
It is a meaningful and important question. If one of the "inferior" embryos somehow slips through the screening and develops into a baby which is delivered alive, then what? Do we treat that baby with the undesirable traits as if they were the moral equal of the healthy baby?
Right now, society says "yes we do", in large part because of what Scott describes as the unsatisfactory state of "before the law you cannot be disadvantaged".
But it's very easy to go along a series of steps, once we start becoming first familiar and then comfortable with talking about "genetically inferior", to move:
(1) It would be better if that baby were not genetically inferior
(2) That baby will have a worse life than the healthy baby
(3) This is objectively true
(4) The objective truth is that this baby will have an objectively worse life
(5) It is the objective truth that it would be better if this baby were not alive
(6) It is the objective truth that it would be better if this baby were killed
People right now balk at the sixth step, but throughout history and different cultures they did not, and if all we have is the "really unsatisfying....claim about ... “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases'" to rest our objections upon, given that we have scrapped "utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something" in favour of objective measures of better or worse genes which objectively give better or worse lives that promote or reduce suffering and sadness as how we classify human lives, then it won't be so difficult to get society over the hump of accepting the sixth step. It's science, after all.
And you will think that is a better world, and I will think that is a worse one.
"If we start saying "a healthy kid is better than a kid with cancer" we might fall down the slippery slope to killing children!"
We're sliding right down that slope, Ives, all in the name of mercy and compassion and, of course, "such decisions should be between the patient/those responsible for them and their doctor":
https://www.mcgill.ca/voice/files/voice/maria_rueda_martinez_reflective_essay_0.pdf
"I worked both in pediatric and neonatal intensive care units, with minor populations who are not eligible for physician assisted death. I witnessed intractable suffering in newborns and accompanied families in the passage of their child’s death.
It made me uneasy to know that what had been recognized as an appropriate type of medical care for adults facing intolerable suffering caused by an irremediable condition was not available for minors facing the same situation. I felt that children suffering was not given the same consideration as adult suffering. I understood that the prohibition of MAiD for minors was conceived as a mean to protect them. However, in clinical practice, I often felt that minors were extremely protected both by the concern and advocacy of their parents and by the knowledge and supervision of the multidisciplinary medical team (including nurses, physicians, social workers, etc.). A total ban to MAiD for minors did not seem necessary and regulatory mechanisms to allow its provision in extreme circumstances were called for.
…. Some children whose death is certain and who could benefit from MAiD are left to endure intractable suffering. Being exposed to such situations first-hand led me to want to understand the legal framework underlying them."
If I had to pick an embryo? I wouldn't. I'm Catholic, I'm in agreement with the ban on IVF etc. (I locked horns previously with Professor Friedman on this). "But if you don't pick an embryo, there won't be a baby!" Well then, there won't be a baby:
https://www.scu.edu/mcae/publications/iie/v1n3.1.html#:~:
https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/reproductive-technology/begotten-not-made-a-catholic-view-of-reproductive-technology
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36518712/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5096425/
That's the whole bunfight right there - are we being objective, though? How do you make an objective measure? Is it really plainly obvious that X, Y and Z *are* 'better' and are 'objective'?
Yes, one of those steps would be to kill the children so they didn't have to watch. Is that a good action?
"Nothing I have said indicates that I want to kill children."
But why not? We're pushing the logic of the proposal as far as it will go. If a life is objectively worse, because it means slowly dying prematurely in pain and agony, then it is both licit and moral to prevent such a life coming into existence, correct?
Fine, but what about such lives already in existence? Do we now shrug our shoulders and say "Too bad, you are condemned to such a future"?
Canada is exploring such concepts, or at least some Canadians are, in regards to "Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) for infants of less than one-year of age with a terminal illness that causes intractable severe distress":
https://www.mcgill.ca/voice/files/voice/maria_rueda_martinez_reflective_essay_0.pdf
https://nationalpost.com/news/quebec-college-of-physicians-slammed-for-suggesting-maid-for-severely-ill-newborns
Of course, the ignorantly sentimental and religious public were horrified by the very suggestion, but give it time.
It's not about what you intend, or I intend, or well-intentioned people intend. It's about how things slip, loosen, fall away, and then we end up with "but how were we supposed to know it would come to this?"
Do you think the people campaigning in good faith for decriminalisation of homosexuality and an end to the Blackmailer's Charter envisioned marriage being re-defined to "any two persons of whatever gender can marry"? Do you think the humanitarian minded in Germany who were concerned about the suffering of those too physically or mentally incapable to have meaningful lives free of pain and misery thought that the merciful euthanasia they supported would end up as a dress rehearsal for the death camps?
...given the choice between you having a short but mostly happy life before slowly prematurely dying in pain and agony while your children watch, and a complete stranger who would otherwise not exist having a full long and happy life in your place while your existence is excised from the timeline, which do you choose?
The term "genetic inferiority" is a red herring. Inferior/superior are value judgements. A less inflammatory term might be "genetically disadvantaged" although there is some messiness even around that. One copy of the gene associated with sickle cell anemia gives you resistance to malaria. It takes 2 copies to give you the condition that will kill you.
I dunno, it seems to me like the question of "genetic inferiority," is really just a vague way of gesturing towards a bundle of different things. If I had cystic fibrosis, I would say that I was genetically inferior in the sense that it's really bad *for me* to have those genes. It would be better for me to have all of my genes except this one that gives me cystic fibrosis. (maybe that's not a cogent idea on certain plausible theories of personal identity; I'm open to that possibility, but in that case we could just say that it's worse for people in general that I, with cystic fibrosis, exist and not someone who does not have it and would be happier for longer).
But when it comes to say, American football (which I am garbage at and my brother is pretty good at), I think I would say that I was "genetically inferior" in the sense that certain things outside of my control (height, arm reach, lopsided legs, etc.) but me in a position to be worse at this activity relative to someone else. This doesn't really bother me, though, or seem cancel-able in either case, at least once you actually break down what the question is getting at. (Whether or not people would actually do that part is another question).
Not that I disagree with Scott's analysis, but the whole question of whether Lance is better than Scott (for certain specific categories of health, strength, intelligence, etc.) is based on the absurd idea that individuals are always *in competition* for resources (food, money, reproductive success, etc.). For the most part people are networks of cooperation. Indeed, the whole (evolutionary) advantage of living in groups of hominids is that the flaws and advantages of each individual can be (at worst) be canceled out by the group, or at best used by the advantage of the group. Og is good at making fine obsidian cutting tools. Gork has the dexterity to make fine fish nets. Furp got mauled by hyena when he was little and he can't hunt very well, but even though he can't cover a lot of territory quickly, he's death with a spear in his hand. So Furp stays home and guards the children while Og and Gork go out hunting and gathering. The power of culture is that groups enhance the abilities of individuals. (And because Furp stays home, when the women come back from nut gathering before Og returns from hunting and Gork returns from fishing, Furp might get laid more often and have better reproductive success than Og, Maker of Sharp Pointy Things or Gork, the Master of Fishing.)
Sorry to be sexist in the analysis. Many (most?) hunter-gatherer societies are matriarchal, and there are all sorts of female-female, female-male, and male-male dynamics that my sexist simplistic example ignores. ;-)
There have been a few posts taking a religious angle toward this problem. After 11 years of education at various Catholic schools and universities, the concept of "human dignity" has been drilled pretty deeply into my brain. Combine that with five years in American public schools and being steeped more generally in the American origin story (defeating a king, "all men are created equal," etc.) and I'm also quite egalitarian. So I bristle very strongly at the idea that anyone is better than I am, even though I know objectively that some are faster, taller, better-looking, etc.
I don't know why the concept of "human dignity" seems to be that difficult to arrive at for the atheist grey-tribe utilitarians of the ACX sphere. Religious belief might help you arrive at the conclusion that (in the words of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights) "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights," but it seems to me that an atheist could believe that while still acknowledging that people have different abilities.
"If people who hurt innocent children for sadistic pleasure are created in the image of God and are worthy of respect and dignity, then the word has little meaning."
Because they are still humans, and humans are worthy of respect and dignity. They may deface the imago Dei within themselves by their actions, but they cannot destroy it wholly. That is not in their power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_of_God
https://web.archive.org/web/20120204043726/http:/www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p80.htm
And when we being to distinguish between humans as being "less" or "more" human, or deserving/undeserving of respect and dignity, we start down the path which ends in the sadistic hurting of children for pleasure - because they're not fully human like me, they're not worthy of respect like me. The sadists have that distinction between "those worthy and those unworthy" firmly fixed in mind, we should not imitate them in that.
We're all shipwrecked and clinging to the life rafts, it's all or none of us.
"I don't know why the concept of "human dignity" seems to be that difficult to arrive at for the atheist grey-tribe utilitarians of the ACX sphere."
Because when you do away with all that dumb stuff about souls and humans being more than just another species of animal on this planet and sky fairies giving Bronze Age rules, then you are left with physical matter and how that is expressed according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. No magic consciousness mind separate from the lump of grey matter encased within your skull. And that hits right up against the "some people *are* smarter than others" (as IQ is often fetishised) hence all moral worth gets reduced to "who is the smartest?" and that becomes "the smartest is best because most productive" and there we go, you cannot seriously claim that Flipper McBurger with a minimum wage job and 90 IQ is just as good as Richie Techbro who is CEO of a multibillion dollar company that is going to colonise Mars and give us practical telepathy, right? If we're gonna talk about "human dignity" there, we have to say that Richie is more "human" than Flipper and thus worthy of, and deserving, dignity because he's creative and productive and is growing the economy every year while Flipper is just a drain on resources. I don't make the rules, that's nature, man.
This is a large part of why EA ever got off the ground, I feel, because they're trying to restore the concept of human dignity by dressing it up in "no, this isn't dumb religion carry-over, we swear, it's respectable Utilitarianism which involves maths, not blind faith!"
The word "dignity" came to prominence in the 17-18th century, and got even more prominent after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, after the 2nd Word War. Just in terms of the history of ideas, I think it makes more sense to see it as an attempt to give a secular, abstract name to the general idea of people being inherently respectable and worthy just by virtue of being human. Rather than depending on them, it's part of the project to rebuild an ethical language that does not rely on religious or metaphysical beliefs.
>There have been a few posts taking a religious angle toward this problem.
<mild snark>
But none of the Aztec gods have been heard from! Surely
>Atlatonan, patron goddess of those who are born with physical deformities or for unfortunate Mexica who suffered from open sores
should have a word in a genetics discussion? :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Aztec_gods_and_supernatural_beings
</mild snark>
Not to be the guy who unnecessarily spams his own work in the comment section, but I do think I have a clue towards a more satisfying answer (from https://thetexashorn.com/2022/07/04/reflections-on-the-4th/)
“ I would submit that the best definition of equality that makes sense, is actually true, and captures what we mean by the word is this: when we say people are equal, what we mean is that they all have a subjective experience, that they are sentient beings. that everyone, regardless of their other characteristics, has their own inner qualia, such that if you hurt them, there is not a mere machine that goes through the motions of being in pain, but an actual consciousness there to experience it. To say that all men are equal is to say that no one qualia’s internal experience is inherently more valuable than another’s. While we might trade off among the competing goods of each person, we are acknowledging that their wellbeing is something to be traded off, that it is a valuable thing that can only be justly traded for more of the valuable thing.”
If I were to rewrite it today, perhaps I would just sway “when we say people are equal, we mean their utilities should be equally weighed.” And declare the problem trivial.* But in this particular case, you could maybe get away with saying that you shouldn’t discount people’s utilities just because they have bad genes
* https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/08/whose-utilitarianism/
But if we ever find out what causes consciousness, aren’t we back to the same problem? Lance is taller and better looking than us, and is also capable of experiencing greater utility
"To say that all men are equal is to say that no one qualia’s internal experience is inherently more valuable than another’s. "
But then we run smack into the Lance problem: Lance is capable of deeper and richer understanding and appreciation of the arts and sciences, he experiences things more profoundly, he has higher heights and deeper depths compared to the person mindlessly playing rap in the background while on their phone sexting a random chick they hooked up with while drunk last night.
Can we really say that Lance's interior life and Slackjaw's interior life are equally valuable?
>when we say people are equal, what we mean is that they all have a subjective experience, that they are sentient beings. that everyone, regardless of their other characteristics, has their own inner qualia
Well, there are certainly bodies with human DNA for which this statement isn't true. Given enough CNS damage (I'd guess roughly equivalent to being in a persistent vegetative state - but this isn't my field, so this is a _guess_) they (it?) doesn't have a subjective experience. This _is_ a corner case, but it happens.
I think the answer to the overall "genetically inferior" question (in a world without tricksy journalists) might just be "It's computationally intractable."
Basically, answering that question would require looking at the whole genome of each organism in question, and perfectly predicting the performance of each gene in every possible environment, and averaging it all into something like a survival probability for each organism. Even for a civilization with perfect knowledge of genetics, that seems like a really computationally hard problem. Maybe you could make it reasonable by pruning out genes with negligible impact or extremely improbable environments, or something, but you're still going to have enormous error bars on the calculation. I don't think our civilization is going to know enough about genetics to make that calculation worth doing any time soon. (And resolving the "morally inferior" question between you and Lance requires processing an even greater number of variables, and there's not even an unambiguous value function like survival probability you could use to resolve the comparison.)
It's also worth thinking in terms of whether it would be worthwhile to use gene engineering to convert one genome into another genome. I think it's obvious that "genome A" is always going to be "superior" to "genome A, except with the cystic fibrosis mutation," just because you can convert the second to the first trivially (relatively speaking) and get a straightforwardly better survival probability. On the other hand, it intuitively seems pretty silly to replace individual A's whole genome with Michael Phelps' whole genome (or whoever). If nothing else, each individual change you make in that process might put you in some intermediate state that's drastically worse than either endpoint. And even if you could do whole-genome replacement perfectly, you wouldn't want to do it for an entire population, just because genetic diversity in itself has quite a bit of utility (since the optimal genome for each possible environment is different). So even a genetically-optimal population is probably still going to want some kind of stochastic genome-generation process (e.g. sex) operating, even if it's perfectly reasonable to make spot-corrections to individual non-optimal genes on an individual basis.
What I'm getting at is, "individual A" versus "individual B" in their totality is never really going to be a useful comparison, since completely transforming A into B is probably never going to be a useful thing to do. The useful question is "Does B have particular genes which could be transferred into A to create a better version of A?" Similarly with the moral worth question. Asking "Is Lance better than me?" isn't a helpful question. Asking "Does Lance have traits which I could adopt to become a better version of me?" might be.
Did anyone kinda feel this way about Leopold on the Dwarkesh podcast? Sure, he graduated top of his class at 19, but I’ve memorized more underwater basket weaving techniques
As I see it there are two definitions of the word 'Inferior.'
The first definition is Inferior (Literal) : Lower in station, rank, degree, or grade. lower in place or position; closer to the bottom or base. of comparatively low grade; poor in quality; substandard.
From this definition, I would agree that the person with cystic fibrosis is 'inferior' genetically than someone that does not have it.
The second is Inferior (Nazi) : This person needs to die and I want to kill them.
According to that definition, I would not say that they are genetically inferior.
Genetic inferiority is an interesting phrase because I've never heard a similar phrase used in another context. I figure that means that it's rarely used literally and almost always used Nazi.
"Lately we’ve been discussing some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is - are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population - even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively - isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior?"
"Inferior" is perhaps the wrong term. "Undesired" is perhaps the more accurate term here.
The whole discussion still smacks of ghoulishness, the worst bits of eugenics.
Yugo will teach you patience, humility and to accept transitory nature of reality while Cadilac will make you addicted to comfort and teach you that pay-to-win is an ok approach to dating.
Yugo probably also provides more cars for the same amount of money, for situations in which that matters.
The Japanese have this concept called oubaitori, inspired by the variety of blooms in their springtime. It's made up of the kanji for cherry blossoms, plum, peach, and apricot, combined into one word. The idea is to celebrate diversity and non-comparison: it's silly trying to decide which of these blooms is best or worst, they're each beautiful in their own ways.
As to Lance, he sounds like a good normie, while you're the guy who wrote Unsong, so I would gladly give you the parachute.
> The Japanese have this concept called oubaitori, inspired by the variety of blooms in their springtime. It's made up of the kanji for cherry blossoms, plum, peach, and apricot, combined into one word.
I was unable to document this by using English-language wiktionary or jisho.org. I was also unable to document it by searching Japanese wiktionary for 櫻梅桃杏. Out of an abundance of caution, I also searched Japanese wiktionary for 桜梅桃杏. No results.
I do see several results for 桜梅桃杏 if I accept the top suggested query "桜梅桃杏 意味" on google.co.jp.
One thing that bothers me here is that these are obviously not kanji for blossoms, since blossoms don't get their own kanji. 桜花, a cherry flower, is a cherry blossom; 桜 is a cherry tree.
To the extent that the Japanese have this concept, it does not appear in their dictionaries and their most prominent online interaction with it appears to be asking what it's supposed to mean. Who actually has this concept, and who said it included kanji for specific types of flowers, which don't exist?
I was going to ask if this might be something in the style of a Daoist magical talisman, with many characters combined into one superglyph, but the google results for "what does 桜梅桃杏 mean?" tend to suggest that it isn't.
The issue with your search is that it’s 桜梅桃李, not 杏.
That would explain the phonetics 'ri', but 李 are plums, not apricots.
桜梅桃李 has one gloss on English wiktionary, "to be yourself". Jisho doesn't recognize it at all. Japanese wiktionary doesn't recognize it at all. This isn't a more compelling set of results than the original set. The top suggested Japanese Google search for 桜梅桃李 is "桜梅桃李"; "桜梅桃李 意味" has been demoted all the way down to fourth.
The second, oddly enough, is "桜梅桃李 中国", suggesting that it's seen as a foreign concept, but I probably shouldn't read too far into that.
Ah, it was a one-shot conversion from おうばいとうり on my phone keyboard so I hadn’t put any thought into OP’s claims about the characters.
A search for just 桜梅桃李 on duckduckgo gave me a Wikipedia (not wiktionary) article followed by a bunch of “what does this mean” articles. While the claimed etymology is from old poetry, the meaning ascribed to it seems to be more tied to the teachings of a sect of Japanese Buddhism.
Thanks!
I cannot read a Japanese article (as you might guess from my initial search, I'm more familiar with Chinese), but Google Translate seems to indicate that that article provides some citations for the phrase, with the identity of the first mentioned tree showing some variation, and glosses it as just a reference to different types of trees, the kind of thing you might use to describe scenery.
I'm amused by Google Translate's choice of "In the first half of the 13th century, when the term "Sakuraume Touri" [桜梅桃李] began to be used [...]".
Somewhat weirdly, 日本国語大辞典 has an entry for 楊梅桃李, with plenty of historical citations from the Kamakura period onwards, but doesn't have an entry for 桜梅桃李 [Edit: This is wrong — see my reply to Michael Watts below.], even though the latter seems far more widespread online. (Of course, it's understandable why the latter would become more popular — how could you possibly have a list of blossoms that omits 桜?)
The Nippo Jisho entry is of particular interest, since it suggests that Japanese people were always a little unclear on the issue of exactly which flowers the phrase was supposed to refer to:
日葡辞書〔１６０３～０４〕「Yobaitori （ヤウバイタウリ）。ヤマギ、ウメ、モモ、ナシ〈訳〉柳、梅、桃、梨の木」
(Incidentally, ヤマギ seems to be a mistranscription rather than a dialect form — possibly via mistaken analysis as 山木.)
Do 桜 and 楊 share their pronunciation? In modern Mandarin they're ying and yang, though having presented it like that I should note that despite what the spelling might suggest, yang begins with a Y sound and ying doesn't.
This appears to more or less faithfully reflect the Middle Chinese pronunciations, where 楊 still begins with a Y and 櫻 begins with what I'm guessing is a glottal stop.
There are two articles on it:
https://reerth.com/blogs/whats-new/oubaitori
https://medium.com/@renuvjanand/oubaitori-lessons-from-flowers-e2af338b61a6
> The ancient Japanese idiom, Oubaitori, comes from the kanji for the four trees that bloom in spring: cherry blossoms, plum, peach, and apricot.
If it were an ancient Japanese idiom, I would have expected the Japanese to know about it. The fact that apricots aren't featured in the spelling doesn't fill me with confidence in the articles, either.
Is "YOLO" an ancient English idiom?
> Is "YOLO" an ancient English idiom?
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late."?
If you were trying to document the existence of an ancient idiom going "YOLO", how would that be relevant?
It doesn't express the word, any phrase that might develop into the word, or the sentiment behind the word.
If you want a currently well-known poem matching the meaning expressed by YOLO, I'd go for "gather ye rosebuds while ye may", but again that's completely uninformative as to whether or not YOLO existed at the time, or what it might have meant.
I think there's a more general critique to be made, towards modern anomie. We've only got one life, and one death: what do we do with them? Pointless thrill-seeking is a luxury.
"As far as I know, there’s nothing good about cystic fibrosis."
There is a tiny benefit, actually. My mom has CF, and as a result of the mucous thickening in her lower intestine, she's had about 40% of it removed completed as a result of various blockages. An unintended side effect of this is the ability to eat literally infinite food of infinite caloric density and never put on a single pound of body fat. She eats cookies, ice cream, burgers, pizza, all sorts of shit all the time and never gains weight.
She can't breathe and the medicine keeping her alive at 51 years old costs 60% of her income every month, but hey, she can smash a pizza buffet with no guilt!
"There are certainly people who are better than me in all the usual measurable ways. I have a friend who is smarter, richer, more attractive, more charismatic, and better at helping others than I am. Let’s call him Lance. Am I inferior to Lance?"
Supposing, as you later do, that you are inferior to Lance in every measurable and quantifiable way, then... yes?
But if you're talking with someone who treats "inferior" as synonymous with "worthless" or some equally self-negating or self-destructive term, then that's the issue. Lance may be awesome, and you may be less awesome in every (measurable) way, while still being pretty awesome - there's a lot of room to be a good and worthwhile person, while not being the best person the laws of physics permit. It's about being OK with being imperfect. I don't think "I beat myself up over every way in which I am not matching an ideal I have in my head" is a reason to taboo the word "inferior". It might be worth it to notice if you're engaging in a thought pattern that usually makes you sad/depressed, and use your internal use of the word "inferior" as a red flag for that thought pattern, so you can interrupt it... but a person with healthier thought patterns (note: this could be you later!) who could handle the idea that they are not perfect without freaking out about it and thinking maybe they shouldn't exist then, could just sort of go "yeah, person X is better than me, all things considered, and person Y is worse than me, and this is day 19,227 of my quest to become better over time, which in general seems to be working out OK, everything's fine".
I think the best answer to "am I inferior to Lance?" is "yes, but remember, that's fine, most people are, and I'm pretty good", rather than "haha, trick question!". Unless, for you, "yes, but that's fine" is not a thing you're capable of thinking at this time.
> This is also how I feel about genes for schizophrenia and genes for low IQ.
At this precise moment in the piece is where I think there are real counter-points to make. I agree that Schizophrenia is a bad condition to have in general, but the problem with the psychiatric model here is that it only thinks pragmatically. It does not think in some sort of idealistic or creative way. It's rather rigid, rather "This on the surface doesn't seem to work so we'll say it doesn't work".
The whole point of schizophrenia in evolutionary terms is as a survival strategy. It's often a terrible one, sure, but... in some cases of infinite "game space", you are simply not getting out of whatever sticky situation you're in, without some random thought that goes something like, "They must have implanted technology to read my thoughts". That's the strong suit of schizophrenia. That tiny bit of nuance of course is not to go off the deep end and just declare that we should turn everyone into schizophrenics, but it should at least give some sort of pause. Even the most subtle pause. That nuance is important, and has been sorely lacking in psychiatry(with a very rich history of moral atrocity).
Now take low IQ or better, learning disability. How could learning be *bad*? Isn't learning good? More learning, more better, right? Surely. Except... when you're a (often malevolent) dumb monkey species like we are, it turns out there are lots of things we teach, and lots of things we learn, that are actually pretty shit. Take pause for a second and notice how utterly oblivious to this fact we tend to be. We just *assume* we must have things figured out. Many of these errors we don't even realize right now, and may never realize. So being slow to learn can be disastrous for... just getting socialized, or finding a career, or doing the kinds of pragmatic "basic" things humans value, but it can also be highly protective towards not having one's brain infected by bullshit. That is a big part of why children are so intellectually magical-- they have not been corrupted by bullshit in their ignorance, and so they have this wisdom to them that many adults lack. This wisdom will unfortunately be beaten out, or drugged out, or otherwise neglected out of them as they grow up.
Science waves a magic wand and all genetic abnormalities now have pharmaceutical interventions that allow people to live mostly-normal lives. They're not cures, they're just pills/injections/creams/whatever with some minor side effects that make it possible for afflicted people to live into adulthood, maybe even old age. It might take ~100 years for the magic wand to take full effect, but we're getting there. Who could object to this?
A lot of people who normally would have died young and horribly (XSCID, EGFR mutations, etc.) will now live mostly-normal lives. Sounds great. They'll live long enough to reproduce, meaning the next generation will be slightly more genetically enriched for that specific condition that requires lifelong pharmaceutical intervention. Multiply that by thousands of genetic predispositions. Not a problem for the next generation, maybe, but what happens 100 years down the road? There will be no end to how many new genetic conditions we can unintentionally create through effective medical intervention.
Perhaps medicine is generating its own future demand. Someday everyone will be wholly employed in keeping humanity from sinking further behind, so that all our advances in AI just get subsumed into the eternal treadmill of genetic catch-up.
Another wave of the magic wand gives us the power to remove some deleterious genes from the next generation - one birth at a time, and hopefully through voluntary means in most countries with advanced healthcare systems. Maybe you have the CFTR mutation and don't want your kid to have to take medications their whole life. It costs money and it's inconvenient. Don't forget about the side effects. So the same magic wand that lets us accidentally enrich genetic abnormalities also allows us to diminish them. Great! Except that's not how natural selection works. Genetics is a spiderweb of Chesterton fences with unpredictable results.
Nobody would delete something essential on purpose. But any genetic meddling effectively requires omniscience to understand whether that Chesterton fence is safe to pull down. The magic wand doesn't come with omniscience. We're like the wizard's apprentice. Having stolen this wand, we don't know the trouble we might cause, trying to make our lives better. Most of the worst consequences will be felt long-term, though they seem like natural decisions at the time. Perhaps some Nobel-winning medical advance dooms humanity. There's no telling to what extent this magic derives its power from the proverbial monkey paw.
Should science/medicine stop waving the magic wand? We could stop seeking cures and just let natural selection take its course. Maybe modern medicine is a generationally slow-acting curse. If that's the direction we want to go, though, we have to draw the line somewhere. At what point are we interfering with natural selection versus doing the kind of medicine nobody should object to?
Is there a line? Antibiotics seem like they should be fine, until we remember that this gives some people an artificial advantage they might otherwise be selected against. Those advantages accumulate over time. Maybe antibiotics are slowly putting humans behind in the eternal genetics arms race against bacteria. Someday we'll be wholly dependent on artificial means of preventing routine infections from killing us, and it will be our own doing that backed us into that corner.
Who gave humanity this magic wand to begin with, if not nature and her process of selection? Any intervention necessarily 'interferes' with natural selection, except to the extent that nature selected for humans to have big brains and social structures that allow us to come up with scientific interventions in the first place. Of course, selection has always been a guess-and-check process that takes many generations to finish the 'check' step. Maybe high intelligence and social coordination can go too far, and will be selected against in the long run.
Erm... we already have the technology to read and store genetic information outside of DNA, and then implement it as DNA again. Effectively, a "save a copy before modifying" step. So if we make a bad change, with sufficient technology, we can revert the change.
So it's like having a monkey's paw, that sometimes (often) actually does good things instead of always bad things, and also if it does a bad thing you can go "oh, that isn't what I meant" and hit undo on the situation, with some collateral damage.
If you've got an undo button, you don't need omniscience to get to good outcomes and avoid bad outcomes, even in a hopelessly complex environment. If you pull down a Chesterton's Fence accidentally, just put it back up again. Probably a good idea not to give 100% of the population identical genetics in any particular aspect, but even if you do, just make sure to keep backup copies of the genetic variation the population used to have. Worst case scenario, you spin up some copies of a much older version of the genome, and start optimizing from quite a lot further back, avoiding the paths that led to problems the first time around. So you have the kind of "omniscience" a time traveler who could retry any timelines that went badly would have - not knowing everything, but not doomed if ever a decision goes badly.
1. I don't think most of this is technically or practically possible to date. Or maybe even ever. It's the genetic equivalent of a command economy trying to order a chaotic market.
2. If you're constantly restoring your operating system to a previous state, you're dooming your species. Genetics isn't an OS circa 1995, largely disconnected from the internet. It's a constant race, where if you don't patch the most recently discovered vulnerability you're likely to be taken over by invasive new approaches.
3. It's true that we're just beginning to discover ways to proactively alter human genetics, which could be the ultimate 'solution' to these problems. Of course, this is like writing about the future of technology in the 1850's, imagining a future where we establish interplanetary ambassadors to the Martians by the year 2000, or perhaps mass starvation when global population expands to 500 million people. It's hard to accurately imagine the problems we can't solve in the future, or the solutions we'll accidentally stumble upon. It's probably not a good strategy to get ourselves into a situation we have to innovate out of or die as a species.
4. I agree that you don't want everyone doing the same genetic thing. This means the biggest risk in genetic tampering is allowing either strong social pressures to enforce strict genetic norms (e.g. Gattaca), or strong governmental pressures to drive genetic conformity.
RE: 1: Sure, a lot isn't possible today. But, your original comment was speculating about what would happen in the long term, and we have the beginning of a "save DNA, then restore" technology, in that we can read off DNA and store the pattern of As, Cs Gs and Ts digitally (with some error rate, but it's getting better over time) and we can take a series of stored DNA bases and create synthetic DNA with that base-ordering (short strands right now, but again, if we're looking at the longer term future, that will get better). Getting the modified DNA into cells or modifying DNA in situ is difficult right now, but your look into the far future supposes it will happen easily in time, and I think if we get to that point with the technology, then we will likely get to the point where "take a stored base pair sequence and modify someone's or some embryo's genes to match" is a thing we can do. Certainly if we don't kill ourselves but do keep on with the tech advances for 100 or 1,000 years, we have a shot at it, I'd think.
As for it being a "command economy", that doesn't follow. If the technology to control someone's genetics is widely dispersed and not controlled by a central authority, people can act on local information. It's just, instead of variations happening because radiation hit a molecule or some brownian motion disrupted DNA replication or whatever, they happen by someone saying "I want this variation". Both could go poorly, but the first one has almost no chance at all of going well, most random mutations are bad. So the analogy isn't between "market economy" (no central control) and "command economy" (central control), it's between "prices, supply and demand are set by rolling dice" (no control) and "market economy" (no central control), with a "command economy" option available I guess if anybody wants that, although I don't know why anybody would.
Re: 2: Fair point, there could be an issue installing old code. Except, it isn't quite an analagous arms race. Humans as-is would totally and almost immediately lose the arms race if the race was between the genetics of bacteria and viruses (which change quickly, often on a scale of months to a year) and the genetics of humans. The arms race is bacteria and viruses vs. our immune system, which learns and changes quickly. Swap out some genes but keep the immune system intact, and you're probably OK.
Re: 3: Yep, this is all pretty speculative. But I don't see how it follows that we're necessarily getting ourselves into a situation we have to innovate our way out of
More broadly, it seems like we're in a situation where technology (medicine) and compassion (a desire to keep people alive even if they wouldn't be without medical intervention), have fixed some immediate problems (diseases and things that would kill hunter-gatherers before they reproduced) while storing up some problems for the future (increased mutational load). The way I see it, either more compassion + technology (genetic engineering) or less (go back to no medicine) will work to solve the mutational load problem - but the latter is really unpalatable, so we'll go with the former. We're not in a situation where we have to innovate or die as a species. There's always the option of "no medical care for anyone, only those who can survive without it, survive" - that would just be a really unpleasant outcome, only likely to be taken in some catastrophic scenario where medical care isn't available. But it would deal with the mutational load.
As for your story of us in our non-omniscience changing a gene we shouldn't have, and thus intelligence potentially being selected against in the long run... I don't feel like that holds up. I mean, it's not as if the process that got us here was wise and benevolent, nature is good and technology bad. The process that got us here was nonintelligent, random and not aiming at anything at all, with no care for human life. Engaging in a process that does involve some foresight and planning and is aimed at improving human life, doesn't seem likely to do worse than that. The risk in my mind isn't that we're not smart enough and so we make an unwise change and everyone dies, maybe we would have been better off without the monkey's paw of technology. We're in a universe where random changes to our genetic lineage, almost all of them negative enough to not get passed on to future generations, have happened for millions of years. If an unwise change was likely to kill us all, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Unwise changes are getting made all the time - that's where the problem of mutational load comes from.
The risk isn't that we're "selected against" by natural selection. It's that we do a thing that kills us. I don't think it's likely to be some ill-advised genetic change, because we'll have the capacity to undo that, even if for whatever reason we decide to apply it to everyone, as unwise as that seems. In fact, it occurs to me that, if someone has a genetic problem not present in either parent (a new mutation, an increase in mutational load) given a copy of the parents' genomes and the child's genome, it should be possible to compare them, narrow down the differences, pinpoint the problem... and then revert the change. Figure out what the genetic sequence would have been, and that's the sequence that gets passed on to future generations, by whatever future tech we have for gene editing. That won't make it easy to deal with present problematic mutations, but it could make it easier to deal with new ones, with no risk of knocking over a Chesterton's Fence that wasn't already knocked over in the parents.
4: I mean, an engineered pandemic seems potentially really super bad... but homogenization is also an issue we'd have to watch out for. But if we have control over our genes, and can save copies and restore diversity as needed, then by homogenizing extant human DNA, we're not homogenizing our possible future DNA. Seems like a good idea to maintain copies of diverse DNA in living humans, though, still - like saving heirloom seeds. Which... the fact that we can do that and they don't immediately die due to more advanced viruses and parasites, even though they may be from hundreds of years ago, is another line of evidence that genes from hundreds of years ago aren't like Windows 95.
All very good points. I think the biggest area where our concerns differ is in the question of whether this kind of tool gives too much potential power for central control to create massive vulnerabilities for humanity. I think before the most recent pandemic I'd have been more willing to shrug and say "different people/societies will do different things", and let time and selection take their course.
I very much agree with this part of what you said, "technology and compassion have fixed some immediate problems while storing up some problems for the future. The way I see it, either more compassion + technology or less will work to solve the mutational load problem - but the latter is really unpalatable, so we'll go with the former."
I do think it's possible to get past a tipping point, where you can't return by just allowing natural selection to reduce mutational load, but that's all pie-in-the-sky theoretical. Without a concrete example to work from, we can't know either way.
I'm also not convinced we really understand much more about signaling cascades than we did back when we were irradiating cells to cause mutations and see the outcome. There's a lot of theoretical work to do, without a lot of progress in the past 30 years other than those signaling cascade charts people love to put on posters and presentations. This is what I mean when I say I'm concerned we'll get ourselves into a situation we'd have to innovate our way out of. We know how to screw up the system with current or near-future tech. We don't know when we'll make the kind of breakthroughs that are required to actually understand the system we're tinkering with at a fundamental level.
It's possible we'll always be able to roll it back, like you suggest, though not guaranteed. If all this happens at an individual level, that sucks for some people, but the species survives. Writ large is where the systemic problems come from. I guess if there's always a North Korea or Venezuela that will march to the beat of their own drum humanity will survive.
One final point: inconsequential and/or deleterious mutations that persist for a long time until some day they accidentally combine to create something beneficial is one of the proposed mechanisms for how complex systems arise. If we take manual control of the process, we might be missing out on this kind of future adaptation, since we'll be incentivized to clear out exactly that kind of non-beneficial mutation. In the near future, that puts humanity on a straight shot up to the local maximum, but keeps us from the kind of random walk that could help us discover higher non-local maxima.
In the long run, if we get good at genetic manipulation, enzyme prediction, protein folding, cell/systems signaling, etc. we could potentially design much more complex systems and jump to the kind of non-local maxima that would be unlikely to develop even under evolutionary pressures. That's a long way into the future, given current theory/technology, though.
I guess I get hung up on the "if" part, where we take manual control now, knowing this creates a far-flung vulnerability that we hope future generations will be able to solve. Do I believe technological progress will continue apace to the point where that kind of thing will be trivial long before the problem becomes apparent? Yes, with a high degree of certainty. Would I risk the species on being right about this question? No. But then I guess if I'm making decisions today that won't impact humanity for millions of years that somehow gives less weight to those concerns.
>Maybe high intelligence and social coordination can go too far, and will be selected against in the long run.
<mild snark>
Does successful AGI outcompeting biological humans count towards that? :-)
</mild snark>
Sure, contingent on "successful outcompeting". What if AGI selects itself out faster than biological humans select themselves out? That'd be an unexpected turn of events.
Interesting that we mostly see intelligence as an obviously pro adaptive trait ... except for maybe there's a Great Filter, where too much intelligence dooms you. But if it dooms humanity, why wouldn't it also doom non-human intelligence?
Many Thanks!
>Interesting that we mostly see intelligence as an obviously pro adaptive trait ... except for maybe there's a Great Filter, where too much intelligence dooms you. But if it dooms humanity, why wouldn't it also doom non-human intelligence?
Well, if it dooms humanity _by way of_ us building our successors, it might be that any of:
a) Maybe AGI gets to the limits of computation allowed by physics, and it has no successor
b) Maybe AGI version 1 builds AGI version 2 (and so on), but copying goals/"values"/metrics is a smoother process for AGIs than for the human->AGI transition, so AGI version 1 doesn't consider it a doom.
c) Maybe AGI version 1 builds enhancements, but they are essentially "bolted on", rather like subroutine calls, so AGI version 1 doesn't consider it doom.
>What if AGI selects itself out faster than biological humans select themselves out? That'd be an unexpected turn of events.
Umm, what mechanism do you have in mind for selecting itself out? Humans have a demographic transition, where many of us (myself included) have decided that there are activities that we prefer to reproducing - but we also age. Unless some sort of bit rot is unavoidable, I wouldn't expect AGIs to age.
Some have speculated that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent civilizations tend to collapse before they can become interstellar, and before they can accomplish interstellar communication. In order for this to be an explanation for the Fermi Paradox, it can't be true that a civilization is selected against because they create a more successful successor. If AGI had happened elsewhere in the galaxy, we should presume it would have taken over Earth long before humans arose.
(Sorry, I know many of those concepts are tangential to your original comment.)
Many Thanks! Yes, I agree that AGI replacing humans is not a solution to the Fermi paradox. My personal guess about the Fermi paradox, given that life seems to have arisen on Earth very early in its history, is that one of the later steps, maybe eukaryotes, maybe multicellular life, might be very rare, or that worlds with enough water for life, but not _so_ much water that there is no dry land, might be very rare. Smelting iron underwater is difficult...
Maybe. I'm always skeptical of path-dependent arguments such as these. The implication is that our only example of intelligent life capable of tool manipulation is also the only possible way for intelligence to rise to the level of interplanetary and (aspirationally) interstellar exploration. Organic chemistry seems to suggest that water, carbon, nitrogen, etc. work well together in the manipulation of covalent bonds to transform solar energy into complex systems. But that seems like an oddly specific requirement for something so general as 'intelligent life' to develop.
Like you said, life on Earth developed very soon after it became possible for it to do so. It's difficult to estimate what other forms life might have been able to develop had exponentially growing life from our lineage not already been competing for space and resources on the planet.
It's useful to drill down into the actual meaning of a word and see if the word is useful. These types of questions (are you genetically inferior?) have a connotation that is associated with the word "inferior" which is false. "X is inferior" has the connotation that X can't add value to the world. Jim is an inferior mathematician compared to Terrence Tao. Does that mean that Jim can't add value to the mathematical project? No. Does that mean Jim should quit doing mathematics? No. The only consequence of this state of the world is that if Sam wants to collaborate with someone on solving a mathematical problem, Sam should probably choose Tao instead of Jim, if Tao is available. If Tao isn't available, then choosing Jim might very well be useful. The sentence "Fred is genetically inferior because he has cystic fibrosis" is trying to imply the meaning, "Fred can't add value to the world because of the consequences from his genetic code," which is manifestly false.
Even supposing some sort of weighted ranking of human beings along every dimension (which is generally a useless idea), the person at the bottom of this mythical ranking can still add value to the world.
And in case anyone is wondering what "to add value" means, I take a generous view of that. If one can achieve a "better" state of the world, then one is adding value. So even someone who has locked-in syndrome can add value. They can create a better internal state within themselves than would exist in the world if they were dead. So ultimately, the use of "inferior" in relation to human beings is a useless idea. Banish it from one's word usage patterns. We can all add value to the world.
Because of the work I do I've make a number of people who are not better than anybody at anything. As the general rule such people are very often treated really horribly, and my job was to try and keep that from happening. My personal answer to the question are these people inferior is fuck you for even asking.
Someone who has done some extensive thinking on the idea of judging the self:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/379073.The_Myth_of_Self_esteem
"The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases." This is ridiculously reductive. The Declaration of Independence declares the existence of a form of equality, of which not being disprivileged in court is one consequence. It claims that form of equality is a natural law and that is the main reason for creating a new country with a new system of government. The revolution that installed that system of government inspired revolutions all over the world, and today's internal law generally considers that form of government the only fully legitimate system of government, to the point where most non-democracies at least half-heartedly pretend to be democracies. Even if you don't find this form of "equality" compelling, you should put some thought into why so many people have and do.
The real question is not "who's inferior". The real question is: who's richer, has more power and is more happy.
- If you can afford a giant mansion on Malibu beach but Lance can't, then you're superior.
- If you've got "all of those politicians that you carry around in your pocket, like so many nickels and dimes" and Lance doesn't, then you're superior.
- If you're happy about your life and enjoy every single day but Lance doesn't, then you're superior.
All the truly superior people live on Malibu Beach, sip their $5,000 bottles of champagne, host fundraisers for famous politicians and wake up genuinely happy every single day. The other 99.9% languish on obscurity and have to deal with all the discomforts a Malibu Beach person never has to.
Ive never felt beliefs are voluntary
How about this as a summary of what you're trying to get to here:
"My utility function and everyone's utility function treats your positive utility as being of equal values to Lance's positive utility. We do and should value your happiness and well being equally. We treat all people's positive utility as being equally important irrespective of anything else, with a special emphasis on not valuing anyone's utility more due to immutable inborn traits."
I think that statement lets you aboid all the bad Nazi behaviors without saying we shouldn't try to reduce the percentages of people that are born with cystic fibrosis
If you ask me if I should save Lance over you, I respond in two different modes at once:
1) Utilitarian / rationalising / constraint solving: This is a terrible situation but there's a clear right choice to make.
2) Agape / humanist / emotional: All humans are valuable and unique souls. Any death is a tragedy. What right have I to choose between two irreplaceable individuals?
I still save Lance (sorry), but I think (2) is *important*. If I were choosing between Lance and a cow, I would feel bad for the cow but wouldn't feel any sense of conflict.
I think that there's a correct, right, just impulse in us that says that even if (in mercenary terms) some people have more impact, there's also a sense in which every person is part of the tapestry of life and any attempt to compare people in absolute terms is reductive. If we were perfect rational agents, maybe it wouldn't be an actionable impulse — but as satisficing, flawed decision makers it serves the crucial function of making me try REALLY DAMN HARD not to throw anyone under the bus or leave a man behind.
Perhaps one life is worth more than another, but humanity tells us every life is worth *a lot* and you have to check a lot of significant figures to find the difference.
I wonder how culturally universal these considerations are. In a hierarchical society (e.g. feudal Europe) everybody believed that some people were more valuable than other people. Indeed, does this argument even play in modern Europe?
This post exists in a very odd space where several thousand years of moral philosophy seem to be largely absent. While popular and utilitarian notions of value may be reduced to such criteria as wealth, attractiveness or charitable giving. A superior morality grants moral status to those who possess the capacity (or fact) of being able to experience certain qualitative states. A concept that should be familiar to EA who are concerned at the suffering of clearly “inferior” species (shrimp will not win any contests against Scott’s superior friend). Religious and most virtue ethics systems arrive at the same place via the “soul” or “logos” as well. Which leaves me with a simpler contention. Scott knows all this. Which means he really is committed to a purely utilitarian notion of moral value. And that version really is a nightmare that does lead to dismal outcomes. It’s a world view where the guy who wins the lottery is REALLY better than you. Instead of the world nearly everyone wants to live in. Where your moral value is equal to all others who share with you the state of being conscious and being able to experience all that this entails (feelings, experiences and, for most, the ability for reasoned thought). Put simply the fact that you are an individual and on that dimension have moral equality with any other individual. I would add that this morality is not only more aligned with most people’s instincts and desires but it’s also instrumentally superior. For Scott’s alternative is utterly incompatible with creating highly pluralistic and cooperative societies. Because I’m a world where whether you get the life jacket depends only on your bank account or social media followers is a savage and inhuman battleground where collaborative strategies are consumed by Nietzschean fire.
As others have said, I have no qualms in agreeing that some people are superior to me in all sorts of ways that matter, and who would deserve the last parachute before me. We're dealt a certain hand in terms of genetics, inherited culture, upbringing, etc., and on top of that we put more or less effort and wisdom into ourselves, and choose to go in certain directions or others. And as others have said, it would be a pretty poor experience not to have anyone to look up to!
In a way, I think coming to peace with a certain sense of limitation or disappointment in life is also a hallmark of integrating the wisdom of middle age. The possibilities no longer seem endless, and all sorts of ways of propping up an exaggerated self-esteem by thinking "I might still do X" start falling by the wayside, and that is actually a good thing.
But Scott seems to be pointing at the interesting point that this is in tension with the widely held idea that it's somehow important to think that we are all "equal" in some sense. It's quite at the core of classic Western humanism to consider each other as basically equals, even though the concept breaks down as soon as you start looking at it in terms of any concrete sense of value or achievement.
We can think of this as a cultural abstraction. We talk of people having rights, such as the right to property or free speech, but "rights" are cultural abstractions, they are not found anywhere in nature or in any kind of logical necessity. However they are not a fiction, because they actively shape the culture in ways that have a direct impact on our actions and attitudes. If we didn't have the cultural notion of rights, we wouldn't get righteous anger when those rights are not respected. But we do have this anger, and we collectively accept and find it normal that other people have it too, which shapes our society in a certain way. So the abstraction of "rights" is in the end shorthand for a set of attitudes and expectations, which our culture has adopted and found beneficial.
I think the idea of equality works in that same way. It's shorthand for the expectation that people ought to be treated at least somewhat fairly, without having to do anything special to earn it. It's quite close the idea of dignity, as in the idea that the modern West is a dignity culture, which replaced an older honor culture. Its sets a common expectation, and therefore also sets the stage for a common disapproval of anyone who goes too far in exploiting, dismissing or disrespecting another human being.
In the end I don't think it's any great mystery. Shared abstractions have lots of power, that's what culture is basically made of, which makes the bulk of our living environment as human beings.
Which makes me wonder if I'm perhaps missing Scott's point, because what I just said here sounds like a rehash of stuff Scott himself has been blogging about since forever. Anyone?
The two examples used are not the same, not equal. Cystic fybrosis has, predictably, thus far, quite similar outcomes, while schizophrenia does not. The cause of cystic fibrosis is understood, whereas the cause(s) of schizophrenia remain murky and outcomes are quite markedly different, from one individuals to another, even though they’ve been diagnosed with the same disorder. Like Bi Polar and Spectrum disorders (perhaps also some others that affect perception, behavior and personality), schizophrenia can also confer some kind of different perception, in some people, savant or savant-like insights. The brain system and how it affects the mind, in contrast to the example used, cystic fibrosis, unnecessarily confuses the argument, albeit, for me. The moral dilemma question remains. Is Lance better? Maybe thus far and so the parachute analogy works fine, maybe there’s some predictability there. The problem that I find with the analogy is that it’s like setting a lab experiment to predict real life situations. The outcomes from those types of experiments are too flawed often enough for the data to predictable across populations. There are just too many variables and the same is true of those problems of perception, personality and behavior—to many possible variables to predict accurately. And what of hope? Should we then argue that if we could confer hope, we should or should not confer hope? Is hope perceived as bad or good? If we perceive hope as good, wholesale, do we confer hope to every embryo? What happens if hope is conferred in an individual and whomever forgets or decides to not delete the (as yet to be discovered or non existent) gene associated with Malignant Narcissism or the Dark Triad? We don’t have a hope gene, whereas, we do know more about a mutation of the gene that causes cystic fibrosis.
"Good night and you are not inferior to anyone."
Wait, didn't the post essentially say "Lance is superior to me but for mental health reasons I should avoid thinking about it"? Avoiding asking that question doesn't seem like an easy thing to do, so for many people, the only effective way of not asking that question may be to develop an outlook that, at the expense of consistency, and possibly succumbing to hypocrisy, brainwash ourselves into an "equal value" philosophy.
Can't you just replace "genetically inferior" with "has inferior genes"? The problem with the former is that it sounds like you're making a judgement of the whole person, whereas the latter is clearly just focused on the genes.
> So: are people with cystic fibrosis genetically inferior, or not?
I would say that the cystic fibrosis gene is maladaptive. Everything else is downstream of that.
Part of the breakdown here is the old classic about group means vs individual performance.
Saying 'it is on average worse to have schizophrenia genes than to not have them' is different from, saying 'this specific person with schizophrenia genes is a worse person than every person who doesn't have them.'
But the phrase 'people with schizophrenia are genetically inferior' evokes *both* of those meanings.
And then the people who interpret it different ways argue forever.
Old Italian mother saying:
“you’re no better than anyone else, but nobody’s better than you.“
I think there are two concerns here along with a third that's less related to the exact question Scott is asking.
Concern #1: The statement "x is inferior to y" requires some limiting principle, as in "x is inferior to y when it comes to (for example) ability to play tennis." If we simply say "x is inferior to y," then we're bringing in all the baggage, good and bad, that comes up when we talk about inferiority/superiority.
Concern #2: When we use "inferior" and "superior," especially when we're talking about genetics, we invoke a huge number of emotional-, moral-, and value-laden assumptions, histories, and ways of looking at the world. That's almost inevitable. It's almost impossible to talk about genetic inferiority without somehow invoking nazism.
Concern #3: The broader issue Scott is engaging is whether it's okay to terminate a life/potential life on the grounds that it would suffer from some horrible genetic defect. It's not only whether the defect is truly desirable or not or whether it might have some redeeming virtues. I realize that's not the direct topic of this particular post, but it's part of the broader discussion.
You seem to be essentially saying: our attributes can be mapped to points of a complete lattice of all possible human features, and moreover we cannot map the partial order that this lattice forms into a total order in any consistent way. We are therefore all incomparable by any "inferior/superior" order, and the edge cases like the identical twins differing in one gene can be ignored because even identical twins are slightly different in some attributes due to differences in gene expression. I would agree with this argument. Economists might want to disagree (with reference to arguments about arbitrage) but they would be wrong.
Ask a stupid question...
Seriously, you’ve pointed out the problem with the question, but seem to be reluctant to just say, “Some people are certainly inferior to others in one or more characteristics. So what? They all should have equal rights (given they don’t infringe the rights of others)."
I think the right answer is that yes; you are genetically inferior to Lance; yes, your life is less valuable than his; yes, this is unfair but it's also true. Just as you can't fly or shoot lasers from your eyes, you can never be as good as Lance, it's just a fact of physics. However, despite not being as superior as Lance you should still strive to do everything as best you can and strive to achieve as much as you can -- because realistically Lance's existence (superior though it may be) doesn't impact you all that much.
Hi Scott!
Thanks for the thoughtful article. Here's my approach:
First, love the sinner but hate the sin. This is analogous to loving the person with cystic fibrosis, but hating cystic fibrosis. No person should be defined by any single trait, whether it's a genetic condition, a crime in their past, a wrong opinion on one topic, etc. Yet, those single traits can be unhealthy, evil, or false. I imagine most people living with cystic fibrosis would wish to be rid of it, same as how I wish to be cured of migraines.
Second, we each have a role in the body of Christ/society. Not everyone is a brain or an eye or a mouth. If you've been taking them for granted, consider for a minute how valuable your feet are. Janitors and bus drivers are similarly extremely valuable to a school district. Get involved with whatever mission strikes you as the most important and/or best suited to your skills and interests. Then, be content with the role you're given there. If the role is simple, you can overflow your spare time into helping others or learning from them. It will be noticed.
Third, beware of Satan (lit. "the accuser"). Accusing other people leads to discord, not harmony. Accusation and judgment should thus be internal, not external. ("remove the log in your own eye first", "he who is without sin may cast the first stone", "neither do I condemn you"). Declaring someone else to be generally "inferior" or "superior" is a judgment. Don't compare yourself to others. Crush the bricks of arrogance. Be on their team working toward a common goal, each doing what they can. Instead compare yourself to where you were yesterday and where you could be tomorrow.
Kind regards,
David
"If we screen off your impact on the world around you (e.g., how much you're helping others), how sad it'd be if you die?" It's valid to consider all humans to be equally valuable, in the sense that there's a component of a utility function that's just "did this human stop existing" times N utilons; there are other parts that the same variable can influence, but it's valid to talk just about this part.
> I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he's better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have "equal value"?
Improving the lives of others isn't just about how much this increases their ability to improve the lives of even more people. We care about the quality of lives. And we care about human lives not ending. It's ok to care about these things as ends to themselves, and it's ok to assign an equal amount of this sort of caring to all human beings.
(This, of course, leaves open many questions, like would a superior alien that consists of an equivalent of multiple humans, be more valuable, than a human? Is there a coherent way to agree with that without agreeing that some humans might be inferior in that quality? At what age is it no longer ok to eat babies?)
The best justification of the belief in equality that I can think of is political: If we believe we are better off under a political system that does not create a privileged class, then such a system is supported by a belief in equality. That equality is not of the sort that is measurable, but we will talk about it as if it is, because of how sentences work.
Hmm. Obviously they mean something like "moral worth." It's not a claim that everyone is equally good at math or basketball. This seems so obvious that the post itself seems odd to me? Is Scott genuinely confused? Is there some secret message or nuance that I'm missing?
To me, the phrase "genetically inferior" implies that the person with worse genes *deserves* to be worse. That they have some moral failing that justifies their worse genetics.
I'm pretty short and my life would be better if I were taller. If someone told me I was "genetically disadvantaged" or even that I had "bad height genes", I would feel seen. If someone told me I was "genetically inferior", I would feel slighted.
Don't know if that's how others use or interpret the word "inferior".
If you're in a community where intelligence matters, evaluation of members matters.
If member evaluation matters, then some members are going to get disappointing results and some will get very good news.
You cannot have the ability to tell people "you are not intelligent enough to consistently evaluate others ideas" without gaining the opportunities to gaslight them. Likewise, you cannot stroke someone's ego without gaining the capability to pull their thinking in specific directions.
It's a difficult dilemma. We need better communities.
I really like that twitter account. I think part of it is because I'm bad at self talk and reading stuff like that helps.
A way I see "you are not inferior to anyone" is "try the thing you want to do". Sometimes I feel inferior in an abstract way, but sometimes it's "there's no point in trying this, Lance is going to be better/Lance didn't manage to do it", but reading that I'm not inferior to anyone gives me motivation to still do the thing. And doing the thing is usually better than the alternative because I'll be better than the me of yesterday.
“Born equal” and “not inferior” and such, to me, just mean “deserves a baseline level of goodwill and kindness (that’s about average)”. Unlike nazis.
Some people may be more equal than others in the burning plane parachute elections, and there’s probably pretty privilege and such going on in spite of these declarations, but assurance of a high floor of goodwill matters a lot more than where the ceiling is, especially for people worried about being labeled “inferior”.
Humanity is ready to get much, much better at epistemics. There will still be powerful people pushing back.
Humanity is NOT ready for a "public recognition of the significance of genetic differences" revolution. In fact, humanity is SO not-ready for that, that it could severely interfere with the emergence of better epistemics and other improvements.
> if you say ‘yes’, you sound like a Nazi.
Perhaps part of our difficulty in thinking about this issue is that our culture, since World War II, has gotten overly spooked about "sounding like a Nazi." Especially the "sounding like" part, which is necessarily vague and discourages clear thought.
As Scott points out, things can be inferior and superior along multiple dimensions. We need unembarrassed acknowledgment that one can notice and affirm difference along some of these dimensions without being a "bad person." Regardless of what some will say this "sounds like."
> Another possible answer: fine, in every real world test we can dream up, Lance is superior to me, but there’s still some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something.
Could we say something like "it is equally bad for Lance and you to suffer, and it is just as morally imperative to reduce your suffering as to reduce his"? (assuming this suffering doesn't impact the comparisons above such as your respective abilities to improve the world). Do you think that's both correct and satisfying?
How about the trollish meta discussion in this debate? Most people's desperate desire to not feel inferior is because of their obsession with status which they regard as existential. And it *is* existential because status impacts how likely you are to replicate your genes. So should we select for embryos with genes associated with less status anxiety? No one would care if they were inferior then. *Insert evil mustache stroking here*
>So should we select for embryos with genes associated with less status anxiety?
That might be reasonable (if feasible). We seem to mostly be able to organize large activities in hierarchies. "Matrix management" approaches have often failed...
I have made some partially positive comments about Brave New World here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative/comment/56490956
I acknowledge the selfishness of this position, but I'm only down for a Brave New World if I get to be Mustafa Mond. Otherwise, I 100% agree with the savage.
Once my basic material needs are met, the only things I care about in this life are art and intellectual inquiry. I'd rather be a dog than a human in a universe with no scientific inquiry and no human art.
Many Thanks! That's fair, everyone has their priorities. Actually, you might not want to be Mustafa Mond either. Remember he said "Happiness is a hard master--particularly _other_ people's happiness."
This is an unsatisfying answer to many but imo the only reasonable one. People are saying that no one is inferior or superior along the axes (as well as the specific ways) the connotations that words like “superior/inferior” carry & that people are concerned about. I.E. having schizophrenia or cystic fibrosis doesn’t make you deserving more of shame, you don’t become more or less deserving of love if you have those conditions or not, it doesn’t make your happiness and life satisfaction less worth pursuing than anyone else's in some terminal utilitarian calculation. A genetically identical twin with cystic fibrosis still deserves to be treated with just as much respect as one without etc.
Once you break down inferiority/superiority/value into different dimensions you can more concretely express that you think beings are equal in important ways across it. For example I personally believe animals are equal to humans in terms of how much their unwanted suffering should be reduced. If I could alleviate X amount of human suffering or 2X amount of animal suffering I’d prefer the later option because I don’t think animals are inferior to humans in terms of moral consideration. If I said something like “animals matter just as much as people” someone could counter with “surely humans have more impact on the course of important events and therefore matter more”. The statements wouldn’t be a contradiction though because we’re talking about a different dimension of the concept “mattering”.
If I say “beautiful people are superior to ugly people and are more valuable too” I can be correct in that they are superior in terms of beauty (duh) and that all else being equal we get more value from them in a way they don’t for ugly people, but wrong in all the ways that statement implies to any average person hearing me say it. I’d be wrong in saying they’re definitionaly more trustworthy and moral (I know the studies correlating the two but it’s not a categorically universal truth that everyone is more moral than anyone uglier than them and less so than anyone prettier than them) or it’s the most important dimension of value or that ugly people should feel less deserving of respect and care in how they’re treated. It would be silly for me to say something like that and then complain people are interpreting me wrong or acting in denial of ways beautiful people are objectively superior to ugly ones.
Likewise most people are just worried about having a society where we see it as okay to treat people with disabilities or disease as if their feelings don’t matter as much or it’s more okay to be disrespectful of them in a way it wouldn’t be for healthy people or that they’re inherently less deserving of certain privileges even if the utilions we get in the end are equal. If someone had a weird condition that made their blood cure cancer in anyone who had it transfused, they would be the most valuable human in the world & they’d be objectively better along dimensions of what they contribute to the world and how much we want to keep them alive versus anyone else but most would argue they’re still equal along dimension of how much respect they deserve, how much compassion they should be treated with, what kind of social status they deserve, how much their happiness and wellbeing is important outside of instrumental ways it affects the value they provide and we also wouldn’t want them to feel less good about/concerned for themselves if their blood lost its healing property.
I sympathize with the frustration of wanting to just improve people's lives through unfairly stigmatized and tabooed practices like genetic modification and be able to get people agree on simple statements like “it’s better to not have genes that make your life filled with more needless agony and suffering, even if you can be better in some other ways than it is to have them.” or “the world would be better for most people on average if we had more smart people than if we didn’t.” but we can’t get there by acting ignorant of how terms like superior/inferior in proximity to health and genetics comes off and then being upset when people worry we’re using the terms in ways they are and have been used by others.
I’d hope most readers of this blog would understand that words and concepts can be areas of high dimensional idea space instead of simple dictionary definitions and that sometimes it’s important to explicitly delineate boundaries between subareas in them.
There's always the Sam Raimi-Colt solution:
"Good genes, bad genes... I'm the one with the gun."
Sophisticus: Excuse me, do you know the way to city center?
Stranger: You good bro! You’re in city center right now!
Sophisticus: But…most of this area looks pretty low-rise. And the edge of the city is right there – past that boardwalk you hit the ocean. How can this be city center?
Stranger: All of Los Angeles is the city center!
Sophisticus: What?
Stranger: I know it sounds off. Everyone from out of town seems to think Downtown Los Angeles is, you know, *the* big downtown. But then how do you explain the fact that the traffic on the 10 is heavier going *westbound* at morning rush hour? And that’s without even getting into Hollywood and the hills.
Sophisticus: Who would design a city like this?
Stranger: …design?
Sophisticus: Look, I need to get to Urth Caffe, and I know it’s in city center, so if you’re not going to direct me to city center, can you just tell me what part of town Urth Caffe is in?
Stranger: It’s in the center. The whole city is center.
Sophisticus: Let’s try this again. Please point me in the direction of Urth Caffe.
Stranger: There’s one here. There’s also one in every other city center. Melrose, DTLA, Beverly Hills, even Pasadena.
Sophisticus: But which one is the real one?
Stranger: What is this, the Dumb Starbucks episode of Nathan for You?
Sophisticus: By “Urth Caffe”, I just mean an ordinary non-perfect building with a greater-than-average propensity to serve coffee!
Stranger: Then go to Starbucks!
Sophisticus: That’s not Urth Caffe.
Stranger: So go to the Urth here in Santa Monica.
Sophisticus: But this can’t be the unique city center. I haven’t even had to get on the 405 yet.
Stranger: Who told you every city has a unique center?
Sophisticus: Well, there has to be some ranking of the different neighborhoods, right? There’s nothing stopping you from arranging them in order. Are you some kind of radical egalitarian who thinks everything has to be exactly equal?
Stranger: Okay, the city center is Alhambra.
Sophisticus: Alhambra? I’ve never heard of that.
Stranger: I just put them in alphabetical order. Alhambra is first.
Sophisticus: You can’t argue that that makes it central!
Stranger: The alphabet is very salient. Everyone knows about it.
Sophisticus: But it’s not what I was thinking of when I said the center.
Stranger: Look, I picked an ordering. You seem to have a different one in mind. But I am telling you that no one around here uses the one you’re assuming must exist.
Sophisticus: All my European and East Coast friends know what I’m talking about when I say the city center. My own city has one.
Stranger: Wonderful! You can go there! I’m sure they have a Starbucks too. But the ten million people in the place where we are actually having this conversation just don’t rely much on a concept of “unique center” to describe their metro area.
Sophisticus: Wait, I know what’s going on here! The powers that be won’t go around publicizing the geographical center of population, or the midpoint of a circle approximating LA County, because of woke.
Stranger: I could look those up for you. But it’s still going to take you farther to get to the Urth nearest there than it would to go to the one right here. And the zoning isn't going to be any denser there, either.
Sophisticus: Wait, I know you! You’re my old friend Simplicio, who quit philosophy to become a surfer bum.
Simplicio: Not to mention a caffeine fiend and a scriptwriter. But do you see my point, bro? You can lead a person to a total ordering, but you can’t railroad them into adopting it as a salient lens on their world, nor would you want to – if it were useful to them, they’d already be using it. And you certainly can’t jump from “I have an ordering in my head, which is correct according to some metric” to “everyone who disagrees with me thinks I’ve calculated the ordering wrong under that metric, or disagrees with the whole idea of comparing things.” Any metric that’s actually interesting is probably also arbitrary, in the sense that different people are in different situations that select for different value systems. Just because you can pick a unique first neighborhood in the alphabet doesn’t mean you can pick a unique most central neighborhood. Just because you can get everyone to agree with the motte of “it’s better not to have a single mutation that gives you cystic fibrosis, than to have it” doesn’t mean you automatically get to push through the bailey of “therefore, considering the eons of evolution that have given the human species a normal IQ distribution, trading off academic-style reasoning ability against other useful traits, it’s definitely objectively better to have a 105 IQ than a 100 IQ.” And nothing in this argument presumes that intelligence is subjective or impossible to accurately measure.
Sophisticus (glumly): I guess you’ve got me there, Simplicio. Clearly you’re cleverer than me, on top of being better-dressed, higher up in Hollywood, and a superior surfer. If a runaway trolley were hurtling toward you, I’d have no utilitarian choice but to jump into its way.
Simplicio: You’ll be all right. LA doesn’t have public transit.
Sophisticus [cheering up]: Oh, right – where would it even go? The central station?
Simplicio: Exactly. And don’t count yourself out so fast, bro. You’ve got an excellent blog.
Can't add much here but I want to say I enjoyed this article, it was short and sweet and to the point.
Fucking whining babies.
One thing that's nagging at me about the idea of generalized genetic inferiority and superiority is that it lacks context.
One hint at the problem is that parents aren't replaceable and can't take care of very many children each.
Another angle is that a culture needs a variety of people. There isn't a single best when you need a mix.
There are a few traits that are just plain bad for people like cystic fibrosis, but there are more where it depends or doesn't matter. Mercifully, we live in a culture that doesn't care about attached vs. detached earlobes. At least there's something.
Consider being AIDS-proof-- it turns out that there are a few people who don't have the part of the immune system AIDS latches onto. They're a little less healthy than most people, but they have an advantage if AIDS is circulating.
It's possible, nay, even plausible, that dropping context is a temptation for smart people. If you drop enough context, you get simple ideas that can be mentally manipulated.
Weird, I never felt bad about being inferior to someone. A good example of someone I feel inferior to is Scott. He’s an incredible writer and likely a great psychiatrist. He uses a large portion of his money to help others and has made an incredible positive impact on the world. Even through my entire life, I doubt I will make as much of an impact as Scott already has, and that’s ok with me.
Maybe I’m ok feeling inferior to Scott because I feel superior to over half the population. Maybe egalitarians feel uncomfortable with that proposition, but it feels natural to me. That is actually why I try to help people. It’s a sense of Noblesse Oblige that since I am superior to most I have a duty to help those that are inferior.
I dunno, it sounds like you just convincingly argued that you're genetically inferior to Lance--and more generally, that people and other living things can be and are genetically superior/inferior to other people and living things.
And the counterargument you give is, "If I accept that claim, either outside people coordinate to make my life bad, or some voice inside my head makes me feel bad." Fine, but what threats people make and/or how you feel is no evidence one way or another about the overall territory out there. If there's a structural "genetic superiority" and "genetic inferiority" relation out there, in the territory, you definitely shouldn't ignore it _because recognizing it makes you feel bad_!
What's wrong with responding to "is X inferior to Y?" with "What do you mean by inferior?"
This seems like a perfect example of the "Sticker Shortcut Fallacy" I just wrote about: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/sticker-shortcut-fallacy-the-real
"we might say that eg a Yugo is inferior to a Cadillac, even if the Yugo is better on some trivial dimension like having a slightly longer tire life.)"
People deliberately make Yugos, though.
I mean, obviously there's a difference between 'schizophrenia' and 'schizophrenics.' Nobody wants cancer. People with cancer still want to live and have a right to try. This doesn't seem like a contradiction. People are allowed to see certain aspects of themselves as undesirable, things they would remove if they chose.
(The harder question is when parents go in for ABA and trying to make their autistic kids act 'normal' and the kids say "no, I like how I am. The world is wrong.")
Equal treatment before the law is impressive because it goes against the vast swath of human history, including eugenics, of course. The abstract notion even contradicts lots of American history.
"The good of the many outweighs the good of the few" is fine for Spock to say, in sacrificing his own life. It's a very different statement made by someone who pushes him to his death.
I actually have some personal experience with this, since I was born with certain genetic/biological issues, and some people, including at least one member of my immediate family, have called me subhuman and said I have innately less moral worth than them. And I'm not inferring or paraphrasing anything, I mean someone has screamed in my face the exact words, "You are subhuman!"
My way of resolving this has been to recognize, first of all, that there is more than one metric to evaluate someone's genetic quality, meaning that it's rare for someone to be truly superior to someone else across all categories. However, that still leaves us with the case of Lance. Maybe most of us will meet someone who's superior to us in practically every way that matters. Or if not, we will at least be inferior to some person on each of our traits, meaning someone is smarter, someone is stronger, someone is more attractive, someone is funnier, and so on, even if we never meet someone who is all of those things at once. I'm sure even Lance deals with that problem.
So what it comes down to, for me, is making unique and qualitatively distinct contributions where I can. Sometimes I'll come up with a little joke or wordplay specific to a unique situation. I won't give examples of this, because the amount of context required to see the humor wouldn't be worth reading, and that's exactly my point. A few times I've made a whole dinner table, or even a whole crowded room, crack up, by saying something that wouldn't be understood by anyone who wasn't in that exact room at that exact time. It doesn't matter that many people are funnier than me, or even if funnier people were in that same room, because nobody else said that particular funny thing, and probably never will for as long as life exists. You can replace being funny with being strong, kind, or brave, depending on what the individual situation calls for.
Another example of this would be starting a blog which many people find helpful, or writing a book that some people like. Unsong really isn't my thing, honestly, but it's still a unique contribution to the world which no other person made or ever would have made, not me, not Lance, not Tolstoy or Proust. Asking "well how much literary value does Unsong have compared to War and Peace" is like asking "how many blueberries are worth a banana" or "how much red is equal to green?" There are ways of calculating those values either economically or by personal preference, but still, if every banana disappeared from the world then I couldn't make up for that by eating a billion blueberries, even though I like blueberries better. There is a unique, incommensurable qualitative value in the existence of each and every type of fruit in the world, just like there is to every book, and just like there is, the way I see it, to each and every human life.
So, if there were times (and there were)when someone enjoyed Unsong more than War and Peace, or was really hungry for a banana and ate one, or laughed really hard at one of my jokes, then questions of "superiority" are irrelevant.
This may not be enough to satisfy everyone, but it's enough to keep me going. At least until they come out with androids who really are superior to every one of us in every single way. I dunno what to do then.
This article sets out to answer "And do we really want to do this?" this being ascribing genetic superiority to some beings over others. It seem that the discussion completely misses the mark: context. As I see it, the main reason we might want to avoid saying this set of genes is better than another is a very strong prior that bad things might happen shortly thereafter. This prior is not perfect and perhaps some posts by Scott are rare exceptions, who knows. I would wager that a larger proportion of discussions around genetic superiority are in bad faith or fail to appreciate the potential harms. Those exploring this topic as a game of intellectual rigor are the minority and may very well fit in the aforementioned group.
As a thought experiment: if I hear 99 conversations about genetic superiority that are in bad faith - should I be charitable towards the 100th?
As an intuition pump, if someone is doing gain of function research. I might say "sure, I sort of trust that your lab is safe, sure you seem like a great person, and sure we might learn something, but I am just really concerned about the cases in the past where this went *really* badly. Frankly, I would rather you don't even do this research". If that person then wrote a blog post about the different types of vacuum seals, it would not do much to change my mind and mostly misses the point.
The distinction made, twice over, in this article - whether a genetic condition is medically unfavorable or worse off in physical/intellectual competition versus a 'soulful' judgement of inferiority - points to a slight semantic confusion between what is actually understood as inferiority as opposed to a biological disadvantage. The connotation of inferiority has to do with a human or cultural value judgement while a genetic disadvantage appeals to a 'natural' qualification against some metric, like longevity or utilitarian purpose. Using the term inferiority for a genetic disadvantage confuses, since the metric for inferiority is a social one and not a 'natural' one. These two should only be conflated if the values of a particular society align with a 'natural' judgment of biology, like in Sparta, where the physical dominance and capabilities of the polis were also the main cultural values. Its unfortunate that in the first section of the article, where the comparison between both possible answers was assessed, the biological metric was clearly grasped in the affirmative stance, but in the refutory stance the social metric was avoided or only went so far as "you sound like some sort of callous jerk". This is pretty much as far as modern society is willing to go in talking about social/cultural prescriptions, since the reigning social norm is that nobody has any business in prescribing any social norms: don't tell me what to do or be, and I wont tell you either. If, for example, there existed a society with a culture antithetical to Sparta's norms where, say, localized art or passivity were the social values, then a Spartan in this society would certainly be judged as inferior, in the same way the Spartans judged as inferior those who they conquered on the very basis that who they went against weren't the ones doing the conquering. The article even alludes to this in wondering if the charge of inferiority to Lance could be circumvented by being better than him in some trivial thing, such as 19th century poetry. This question is baked in with the assumption that, to the current society, 19th century poetry is indeed trivial and thus would leave no room for answering no, but does point to the fact that charges of inferiority use a cultural/social metric in its determination, rather than a 'natural' one. Our modern society is nowhere near prepared to discuss, without hysteria, any topic of inferiority, and not because of its own sake but because doing so would first require the fixation of some distinct social norm(s) as positive, distinctly apart from that of 'nature'. Highly-prescriptive pre-modern cultures did have to grapple with this; how much to allow for 'nature' and how much to enforce its norms. There was a constant flux of Hellenistic rulers re-interpreting their states constitutions, which ranged from a 'natural' permissivity all the way to the 30 tyrants. Today, with the modern norm boiling down to the idea that prescribing norms unto others is reprehensible, the ironic conclusion is that the sect of socially inferior peoples are only those who seriously consider if there could be inferiority at all. The twitter post in the second section does exactly this. It reinforces the norm that there is nobody out there with any right to impose a norm onto you, voiding the possibility of inferiority as established in the social sense. The result of this modern liberation has, in turn, been the indirect yet full submittal to 'natural' inequality, now encompassing nearly the entire fraction of social pressures people face. With life, outside of any social goal, being valuable in itself, our culture becomes ever increasingly fixated on youthful beauty, the sexual marketplace, accrual of wealth and territory; all leaving people in the merciless inequality we know to exist in 'nature' since Darwin. Pre-modern enforcement of extra-natural values were the tools, as arbitrary as necessary, to protect society from nature's "might makes right" conclusion. The norms sought to condemn avarice, infidelity, or militance (or promote it like Sparta), and in consequence gave rise to the idea that someone could be inferior in society's eyes. Contrast today's life for life's sake with the traditional Hellenistic wisdom of Silenus as quoted in Aristotle: "It is best not to be born at all, and next to that, to die as soon as possible". This contest between 'nature' and custom will inevitably be fought with much confusion as people seek out to abuse the connection between gene and phenotype. We will need a custom, a distinct positive human value apart from 'nature', if we want to prevent people from being mutated as the fight for "might makes right" reaches its apex.
Your understanding of what we mean by 'Lance is equal to me' seems intuitively very wrong to me. I don't think it's actually a factual claim when people use it, I think they are reinforcing a social norm that helps order society. Similar to how my grandma would say 'Australia is the best country in the world' while also claiming everyone believes that about their country, I don't think she thought they were wrong in any meaningful way and wasn't hostile to foreigners. Team leaders do this a lot as well where they claim 'this is the best team at this company', they are not usually claiming a fact but trying to produce and environment where everyone feels proud and motivated. I understand the statement are structurally different but they give me the same feel, 'every human is equal' gives a feeling of dignity and self respect because people really really don't like loosing status competitions. Most people want to live in a world where they can get that feeling and supporting this statement and associated norms gives them this feeling.
However because it's not really a factual belief most people are willing to set aside the norm is sufficient extremis such as saving children before adults. But the more blatant and the less unique a diversion from this norm the more people feel it threatens the norm. A lot if not most people would balk at saving lance over you, and would see drawing straws as a better solution because it preserves the norm. I don't think most people oppose treating schizophrenia prenatally, but a lot feel the threat to this norm and need to be ritually reassured that this doing this isn't going to weaken said norm.
I don't think its 'trick you into being a nazi', at least when normal people ask the question. It's 'Is that cosplay uniform is from star-wars or the SS? because its making me uncomfortable'
I don't think this is particularly conscious, I seem to notice a lot of human behaviors regulating status and social norm are automatically regulated by fairly base emotions.
I think you are missing a possible answer, and the one which best describes the most common position: "your argument is logically valid, but holding the principle that 'every human's moral worth is equal' and enforcing a norm against people who argue differently is part of how we keep Nazi-ish ideology outside the Overton window, even at the cost of some cognitive dissonance". There's a solid argument that the post-WWII norm against the idea of genetic superiority has been good for the world, especially given that before WWII and the Civil Rights Movement people were generally overvaluing coarse genetic differences.
I think this explains the dissonance of someone encouraging treatment for genetically impacted psychiatric conditions but pushing back strongly on the assertion that having a disorder makes someone "inferior" in any way.
In this sense, people calling you a Nazi might be literally incorrect that you support the Nazis, or even incorrect that supporting genetic engineering is a slippery slope to supporting Nazism. But in a more meta sense they may be right that "public support for these types of arguments are part of what allowed the Nazis to rise to power and therefore you argument should be rejected".
I understand the idea that "instrumental consideration are in some cases more important that the value of pursuing and sharing the truth" is uncomfortable; you've written before about why you think this is wrong and I generally agree with you (for example, it was clearly wrong for the CDC to let instrumental considerations influence their advice on masks). And it's especially bad that the argument isn't explicitly made, so it's more like "instrumental considerations mean that unfair attacks against people spreading dangerous ideas are okay, regardless of whether those ideas are true". But I think you have to engage with this idea to convincingly rebute the arguments and voices against genetic engineering (and a treatise on this question might be valuable; I found the vaguely related https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wS5mprX6BsyeyaNm3/tensions-in-truthseeking-1 after a brief search).
I'm in team get over it. There are multiple scales available and unless you are one of the two in 8 billion people who are top and bottom of each metric, you are somewhere in the middle.
I think the whole thing is driven by sexual selection. Animals want to be attractive, we evaluate mates and competitors, in a kind of animal brain way, the sum of their perceived properties times their felt emotional importance. Then we know which mates to choose and who to hang out with to get the best mates. That's the basic facility. It does involve negative emotion. Culture creates a set of narratives around this grunt level process.
At the animal level, you have a slot on the scale and you try to move up and not fall down. It's just how things are felt to be. In the neocortex world of culture, ideas and imagined alternative worlds, you're position can become a source of disquiet that feeds down to lower the brain systems resulting in anxiety. Then we counteract with a myriad of strategies like telling anyone listening that they are not inferior to anyone. That might give you a good night if you can believe them, but these thing are really just the flip side of status anxiety, so a certain level of strategic stupidity is required.
I'd caution against taking either side too seriously. There are more benign, interesting and useful things to things to focus on if you can renounce this biological drive a bit. And humans are also have this benign capacity for hanging out in egalitarian groups.
The entire framing of this essay confuses me. Let's take another example: Are fluers biologically inferior ("Fluers" are people who have the flu)?
I really do not understand what "inferior" is supposed to mean in this context. I don't think it has an objective definition.
People resist being labelled inferior because people compete for access to and control over scarce resources and opportunities. As one of the critical means of gaining competitive advantage over other people is social status, being labelled in some negative way that other people will buy has potentially very negative consequences. Conversely, being told by a stranger that you are equal to them in every way is reassuring and creates an opportunity to relax for a moment.
When someone is labelled "inferior" a claim is not being made that the person objectively performs at a lower level according to some objective measure. The claim is that the person being labelled is unworthy of respect or status, and should be deprived of opportunities to gain access to or control scarce resources and opportunities.
What I am saying here is that the assignment of worthiness in a human being is a social construct, not an individual one. Status is a in-group membership marker, it's essentially equivalent to being assigned a role within a community. Consequently, it is strategic to be reluctant to accuse anyone of being inferior in some way, because what you are really doing is attacking their in-group. People will be reluctant to risk this unless their in-group has an established, open conflict with the other in-group (ie, racism). Because accusations of inferiority (or, for that matter, superiority) are historically often moves in an inter-group political competition, most people are going to shy away from active involvement, lest they get caught up in some distasteful interpersonal conflict.
"You aren't inferior to anyone" is a peace offering.
I've always assumed that inter-ethnic breeding is good for the gene pool, that families are genetically healthier when they have some diversity. We've all heard the jokes about inbreeding among the fancy people -- buck teeth and bow legs, sexual confusion and drug addiction, etc.
So, am I simply biased in favor of inter-ethnic sex and down on would-be elites, or is there science to back it up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_intermarriage#Inbreeding
>The House of Habsburg frequently practiced consanguine marriages as a way of consolidating the dynasty's political power, with both first cousin and uncle–niece pairings common.[178] The most visible consequence of this was an extended lower chin (mandibular prognathism), which was typical for many Habsburg relatives over a period of six centuries; the jaw deformity is so closely associated with the family that it is commonly known as the "Habsburg jaw" or "Habsburg lip".[179] The Spanish branch took this practice to an extreme: of the eleven marriages contracted by Spanish monarchs between 1450 and 1661, nine contained some element of consanguinity.[180] The last of the Spanish line, Charles II—who was severely disabled from birth and possibly impotent— possessed a genome comparable to that of a child born to a brother and sister.
'Dangerously inbred,' I think the term is.
I'm OK with my lowly peasant lineage -- Irish and Polish. The bad news is we're a little crazy; the goods news is we live long (Or is it the other way 'round?).
Many Thanks!
>'Dangerously inbred,' I think the term is.
Yup! I'm morbidly curious about what _else_ happened to that lineage. E.g. miscarriage rate? How many fetuses never made it to term...
>I'm OK with my lowly peasant lineage
Same here (from somewhere in Eastern Europe, not very sure quite where in my case).
I have to say I'm not I'm not a fan of this chain of argumentation. Scott lays out a toy example using cystic fibrosis, a simple, crippling, single-gene genetic disorder. Anybody who says that having this genetic disorder isn't inferior, is basically playing a gotcha-game. I guess I'm more-or-less on board for the toy example.
The immediate next step on the chain is low IQ (also schizophrenia). So: to object that people with low IQs aren't inferior, I'm just playing a gotcha-game in the hopes of cancelling people? That's really the extent of my objection?
For one thing I feel like there's a category violation going on here. Cystic fibrosis is a disorder (as is schizophrenia). Low IQ is not a disorder; IQ is a multivariate human parameter which includes genetic and environmental factors, it innately exists across a spectrum and in any situation there will be people at the low and high ends of that spectrum. (as opposed to cystic fibrosis, for instance, a binary disorder which could theoretically be eliminated).
I'm sympathetic to pushback against people who are trying to "normalize" disorders, this approach has obvious downsides (for instance, demonizing treatment options). But IMO establishing some innate characteristic to be used as a proxy for human worth is an incredibly fraught process. I think there's a real concern even when doing genetic selection against disordered genes (cystic fibrosis, Down's syndrome, etc.), that there will be a simultaneous dehumanizing of people with those disorders (and yes, I think it's plausible that that could evolve to include large-scale implementations of measures like sterilization and euthanasia against these populations). I think the problem is magnified when choosing an ordered characteristic like IQ. This chain of logic has been played out in the past to evil effect (yes, since you brought them up, by the Nazis amongst others). And I don't accept that this is a "gotcha" objection to a simple semantic statement. Scott packages, in this article, the idea that low-IQ people are genetically inferior, with 1) the implication that low IQ people would ideally be screened out of the gene pool, and 2) a trolley problem wherein a high IQ person's life is saved over a low-IQ person's life. I guess Scott was trying to be magnanimous by offering up his own life in the trolley problem? this would seem a lot more meaningful to me if he didn't realize full-well where he sits in the overall percentile rank of IQ.
I guess in summary it feels like the cystic fibrosis question is being used as a trojan horse to attack the human worth of people with low IQs. And I don't like that. The question in my mind isn't ultimately about being "made to feel genetically inferior"; it's about the types of fates that the "genetically superior" have tended to impose on the "genetically inferior", and how we can avoid repeating all that.
I don't think you're really answering my objections (but maybe I just stated them badly). Yes the Nazis considered themselves superior based on a different set of innate characteristics, not IQ; it's the underlying sorting of people into inferior and superior groups that I find troubling, whatever the parameter used for the sorting. I don't really care that their parameters were pseudoscientific; the same outcome using scientifically derived parameters seems equally horrific to me (sending schizophrenics & low IQ people to the gas chambers instead?).
Sure I agree that being intelligent is good. I guess what I'm really saying is that it's dangerous to start separating people into superior and inferior categories based on innate characteristics. Scott in this article seems to reject a universal basis for human worth essentially as sophistry; I guess I feel like, if your moral code can't find a universal basis like that, then your moral code is broken and its application is going to lead to dangerous places.
The belief that one's own group is innately superior in some way has been the precursor to many atrocities throughout history. The technologies being contemplated are genetic technologies, which if applied will lead to a genetic segmentation of the population; there are also, of course, financial and cultural components which would favour their adoption amongst some groups and not others. I don't think it's a stretch to believe that their wide-scale implementation could lead to the bifurcation of humanity into a "superior" and an "inferior" group (I don't see any scenario where this type of genetic selection is implemented on a worldwide scale, in the 3rd world for instance, so naturally adoption would only be present in some populations). We already see profound polarization between different groups; adding "genetic superiority" into the mix only seems likely to make things worse, maybe even more so if those claims are "true" in some objective sense (as opposed, for instance, to the pseudoscientific Nazi claims that you referenced).
I agree that saying a disease is bad isn't inherently dehumanizing. But deciding than an embryo doesn't deserve to live based on having a disease - I maintain that this has the inevitable side effect of devaluing people who are living with this disease. As I tried to lay out, this seems to me a separate question from the IQ question, since it's about treating a disorder rather than targeting an ordered characteristic. I'm more sympathetic to this type of screening, I do recognize the devastating impact of something like cystic fibrosis; I'm just trying to point out that it also seems to me to be a fraught subject based on this innate quality of devaluation.
It worries me that you can point to a novel intervention like genetic screening, which to me obviously has complicated and unpredictable downstream effects, and simply proclaim "it is moral". You may be right that it will be a net gain for humanity (which I suppose would be enough to qualify it as "moral" from an EA perspective); but to me, your certainty reads as a failure to consider the many possible negative downstream consequences.
The thing about using the phrasing inferior/superior that triggers a visceral opposition in my own thinking is that inferior suggests not just being lower on a force rank list, but in a whole other tier.
This is adjacent to the inferior in every way but not as extreme. Worse in the ways that matter and worse by enough that you are in a whole different category. And assigning ppl to lower categories feels Nazi-esque. We are comfortable saying pigs are inferior life forms but not the same about ppl. And indeed on the whole spectrum of genetic diversity, the worst human and best human are pretty close, so no ones inferior right?
This post touches upon a conundrum I've occasionally considered. It's a heresy in modern western secular society to say one group is superior to another. It is, as the post says, perceived as the hallmark of a Nazi. But ask someone, say a progressive, what it would even mean to be superior. That is, if group A were superior to group B, what metrics would demonstrate group A's superiority? Higher intelligence? More ethical? Greater longevity? Braver? Better looking? Physically stronger? In my experience, you're unlikely to get an answer. The very question will put you under the spotlight of suspicion. Belief in intrinsict equality between human groups, especially human lineages, is both a modern commandment and a claim that cannot, even hypothetically, be proved. It is a moral claim masquerading as an evidentiary one. Equality to a modern westerner is what the divinity of Jesus was to a Medieval Christian.
I am quite willing to admit that I'm genetically inferior to my younger sibling, certainly IQ-wise and both BMI-wise and ADHD-wise as well. But I take comfort in the fact that if it wasn't for my own birth, then my younger sibling almost certainly wouldn't exist due to the butterfly effect. Still, I also acknowledge that if someone was forced to choose between saving myself and saving my younger sibling, and they could only save one of us, and if everything else about us was either equal or titled in my younger sibling's direction (such as future life expectancy), then they should save my younger sibling rather than saving me because my younger sibling has much more to offer society than I myself do. It's sad but it is what it is.
I also want and hope to reproduce eugenically long-term, but I'll need a lot of money for this and I want to ensure that I will not have a severely autistic kid.
What the discussion is about is his society allocates respect. This is an attempt to raise the respect granted to those with CF. And sure it may not make sense in terms of literal truth but the underlying problem is that humans are evolved to be pretty shitty and we tend to treat those whom society judges to be lower on the status hierarchy worse -- morally we should be more concerned about their welfare but in fact we aren't.
And while I think this discussion is confused, it's at least understandably confused. The problem is that it's very hard for people to distinguish the following claims. Indeed, they have exactly opposite practical social meanings/implications and literal consequences.
1) Its preferable that babies be born without feature X because it makes for a worse life (or whatever).
2) The life of someone with feature X isn't worth as much as someone without that feature all other things considered.
3) Its less important to respect and protect those with feature X.
And the problem is the relationship between these three claims in terms of ideal facts and in terms of practical assertions in society is very different.
For instance, as a good utilitarian I think 1 and 2 are probably true for things like cystic fibrosis. In a trolley problem if I know nothing else about the people on the track I'm pointing the trolly along the track of the individual with the more difficult condition.
I also tend to feel that we ought to be particularly vigilant and protective of those with CF because they tend to be particularly vulnerable, can be subject to excruciating suffering without anyone noticing and historically those with disabilities have been treated super badly.
The problem is that as a matter of social reality asserting 1 and 2 tends to lead people to 3. It's fucked up but we tend to assume that low social status/respect means you can get away with treating someone worse.
I think the right response is to try and limit this tendency but I get the intention.
This is basically a variety of the observation that X group gets treated badly because they are seen as low on the social status hierarchy/respect hierarchy so we can protect them by raising that status.
It's the same way that people try and raise the status of the homeless or a racial minority to suggest we should treat them better.
I'm skeptical of the overall approach because someone always has to be at the bottom. I think we may instead want to work on our tendency to treat those with low status worse but that's long and hard.
In principle its possible to iterate all over possible treatments (raising status of people we like) and find when someone (who we won't like) wiill be at bottom yet the system is stable and everyone else likes it.
But that doesn't reduce suffering just changes who ends up doing it. I'd like to reduce it.
>I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance
I may not be reasonable, but I'm absolutely sure that the claim that "any reasonable person would give it to Lance" is wrong, even shockingly so.
Maybe to elaborate on this, briefly - this kind of "Lance is better than me in every measurable way and therefore he is more valuable" goes deeply against the Christian worldview, so I am a bit surprised you treat it as obvious given the fact that western culture has traditionally been steeped in this worldview, even now. But maybe to elaborate - say it's you or a five year old child who will die when they are 18. Do you save yourself?
Lance may be better in every way, but value requires asking: value to whom? To society? To Lance? To Mr. NonLance? If the latter grabs the parachute, we'd judge his act as morally equal to Lance grabbing it, IF we think the standard of morality is each actor's own life & values.
I think the “equal before the throne of God” view is the one most people hold. In many (though not all) modern ethical systems, people have rights that shouldn’t be infringed upon. It’s a straw man to equate this with equality in the eyes of the law (which could be changed by politicians at any time). If you and Lance were on a plane, I think most ethics would object to giving Lance the parachute over strenuous objection from you, though they would differ in exactly what should be done.
As a utilitarian, you can fairly ask why equal ethical values for you and Lance is the bedrock of these ethical systems. But then I really do think you’re open to the “journalist” brand of criticism, that you don’t believe all humans are created equal or are endowed with equal moral value (not saying this makes you a Nazi or whatever, just a utilitarian).
This is the best answer to this dilemma. From a Christian worldview, we are sons and daughters of an infinite being, made in His image. From a materialist worldview, some people are simply Yugos while others are Cadillacs.
I think the common rejection that "some people are just Yugos" is an indication that deep down few people are actually materialists, even if they think they are.
Agreed, especially with that last sentence. In much the same way, lots of people say they don't believe in universal morality...but then go all in on condemning other people for wrongdoing (something very much out of character if you truly believe that what's right for me isn't necessarily right for you). I believe it was CS Lewis that said something to that effect, but it's been born out throughout my personal experience at least.
All humans being children of God is neither sufficient nor necessary to make claims of equal value. Medieval knights who called peasants "men of no worth" were Christians; the Colonel who said of Cheyenne children that "nits make lice" was a Christian*; slave-owners and segregationists in the Americas were usually Christians (as were, to be fair, their strongest opponents). Equality in moral worth does not necessarily follow from everyone being a creation of the same God anymore than it follows from everyone being made of the same elements. And while I suppose that any position of egalitarianism is technically non-materialist, so is any position of hierarchy -- "superiority" is not found in the atoms anymore than "equality" is.
Claims of equal value are a natural and rational part of the Christian worldview. I think to argue otherwise, you would need to point to Christian teachings rather than refer to people who claim(ed) to be Christians.
So called "Christians" may be "Christian" in name only. Or they don't rationally follow their stated beliefs to logical conclusions. (As mentioned above, failure to "follow beliefs to logical conclusions" is actually the same problem seen in many who claim to be materialists.)
I have a couple of suggestions on this.
First, lifeboat debates are fun, but usually not very relevant to real life. Here's a real example: in the decade before Waymo started actually working I read any number of think pieces on the moral implications of how a driverless AI car will solve the trolley problem in real time. Since actual driverless cars hit the road, not so much. The lifeboat debate of "I've lost control, should I crash into Terry Tesla or Padme Pedestrian" gave way to, we'll design cars that very rarely do either. The necessity of computing human worthiness was obviated.
Second, we do make choices about genetic superiority all the time, with in-utero screening for genetic defects. Among most constituencies this is a non-controversial choice, and it clearly involves a decision that genetic makeup A is worth birthing while genetic makeup B should be aborted. The question is why that is, for lots of people, uncontroversial, when saying "A is better than B" would be somewhat controversial.
I want to suggest that moral questions often get solved piecemeal. This is a historical observation, not a methodological statement. But I also want to make the methodological statement that it's a good practice: a robust and healthy way of finding out the answer to moral questions. In this case, I think we can answer small sub-questions on the edge of the problem, "Is it the case that some gene sets are superior to others, and make the people who are endowed with them superior to others?" For example, we can come to a practical conclusion like, the spina bifida mutation is bad, and in fact is so bad that it is a reasonable choice to abort a foetus with spina bifida rather than have the baby. This practical conclusion can be reached and practiced independently of an overarching theory of genetic quality, and may eventually support the gradual development of such a theory.
As to why we currently resist grand theories of genetic quality, well, that's just because we know that they are prone to going wrong in drastic ways. Avoiding a known failure mode is, again, a reasonable methodological approach to a very difficult problem. It's not necessarily completely rigorous, but I think it's rational.
>I want to suggest that moral questions often get solved piecemeal. This is a historical observation, not a methodological statement.
That sounds plausible (caveat - I'm not a fan of morals in general. I would rather discuss preferences, alliances, and negotiations.).
I think that "piecemeal" is kind-of equivalent to "community standards", and this is a fairly reasonable way of balancing mixtures of preferences which pull in differing directions - sort-of weighted sums, _NOT_ deductions from rigid "first principles".
One problem with this approach, though, is if the "community" is strongly inhomogeneous. If this comes down to legal decisions, and they apply across Woke and MAGA, most likely at least one of the major factions won't be willing to live with the outcome. Similar problems arise with multicultural societies, or across some national borders.
Yep, I think that's a reasonable way of looking at it. The MAGA vs woke problem doesn't worry me very much because I think it's 99% aesthetics, and the actual policy differences between the two are minimal. (Though Texas abortion restrictions are an interesting test case. I'm kinda expecting Texas to hollow out at this point, and become entirely Catholic latino.) But in general, yes, negotiations over preferences are the process through which things get worked out. When you find that there's a community standard or rule that a certain group just can't live with, you make the decision to either oppress them or change. And the positive direction of progress is just deciding to oppress fewer and fewer people.
Many Thanks! Mostly agreed.
>When you find that there's a community standard or rule that a certain group just can't live with, you make the decision to either oppress them or change.
Or sometimes there is a third alternative, to partition, as Czechoslovakia did (though this was an unusually peaceful and smooth case).
I think there's sort of a category error here (as also, kind of, evidenced by religion-based comments).
Superior is a relative term and so cannot exist without there being a scale... even in the parachute example, while initially building it up as an example of an absolute value case where we decide who is "superior", you then (unwittingly?) cop out and say the "value" may be that he's better at improving lives of others. But who said improving lives of others matters? It's just, like, your value system, man. Sure, most people would agree it matters when determining how "good" someone is, but that merely makes it the same as e.g. equality before law, that you dismiss - just a system some people devised.
Or in another way, superior without qualifications ("superior candidate", "superior soccer player", "superior spouse", ...) basically presupposes "superior human being", i.e. that you derived a function for a value of a human being. But for such a function to be accepted without falling back to laws of men, you need god or other absolute. There is no god (as far as I'm concerned), so there's no function, so there's no superior.
As a separate point, just to be clear, I am pretty Nietzschean, so I am not arguing this from any kind of leftist/egalitarian perspective. I think the latter argument would be pretty clear (kinda like what deBoer says about judging on intelligence). As for me, the reason parents should be allowed to abort babies with genetic disorders (or anything they want - what if they just hate blue eyes, or tall people?) is not because they are inferior, it's because parents don't owe that baby anything. Ditto for adults... some people might be bad at living a life, along most axes (e.g. the <1% that supposedly commit XX% crimes). They are not fundamentally inferior, we should not judge them apriori; but instead let them naturally starve to death, or eliminate them in the course of harsh retributive justice - based on something they did, not their value as a human being.
The easiest way to get around this is to understand that Lance is worthless without everyone else around him, so how can he be superior ? We are all in this together.
As far as the twitter account resonating with people: obviously a lot of people *do* equivocate between "genetically disadvantaged" and "deserves to feel bad about yourself", and people dont just aim that kind of judgement internally. I think the people who are comforted by those posts are probably reacting to the fact that they *have* been insulted as "inferior", by people who are using it to mean both "genetically disadvantaged" and "deserves to be shamed and laughed at"
In the Simpson's episode "Lisa's Rival", Lisa meets a girl her age named Allison who is better than her along every axis that Lisa cares about, superior in every activity and trait that Lisa has made her identity. And arguably Allison IS a "strictly-better Lisa"... except that Lisa, by virtue of suddenly being #2, is able to experience introspection, self-doubt, and worry. She has an identity crisis, tries on some other identities for size, rejects them, grapples with whether to cheat her way back to #1, and after this personal journey she decides she can live with Allison being better at her than everything.
(Although this is the less important part of my point, I'll note that she learns to accept it because 1) both her and Allison lose a contest to an inferior entrant on totally arbitrary irrational grounds, showing that being "better" doesn't determine your life outcome, and 2) she can bond with Allison through shared interests and shared superiority to the many people who are worse than her; and either realization probably works although kids tend towards the 2nd option.)
But in a meaningful way, being worse at everything than another person actually made Lisa a better person, because she knows what it's like to deal with these insecurities, and Allison never really has to. And as Scott points out, only one person can actually be #1, and so Allison is going to get to Vassar or Wellesley someday and have the same experience, but be less able to cope with it. It is also likely that by learning some humility, there are a lot of people over the course of their lives that will prefer Lisa's values and the way she treats people over Allison, and there are things Lisa could get from others that Allison couldn't. And this would hold true even if Allison were also better in the aggregate at promoting the same charities and social causes Lisa cares about.
There is a simple solution to this problem.
Some people are actually inferior to others. One simply can choose not to oppress or murder people about it. It is possible to be an elitist about moral value, without killing people about it.
The reason the Twitter account exists is very simple. People who are actually inferior to others in most ways would rather seek reassurance than try to improve themselves. The Twitter account provides the reassurance. The ambiguity of the word "inferior" precisely serves this demographic by letting them seek reassurance about the practical meaning (skills) and justify their reassurance with its abstract meaning (fundamental humanity).
I feel like I comment this under every embryo selection post, but not being a Nazi involves more than just dodging verbal traps. The map is not the territory, and your object-level opponents are not sneaky journalists writing hitpieces!
Hitler himself said, "You must exist alongside the stupidest possible version of your ideology." What is the most bad-faith, black-and-white interpretation of your stance on embryo selection? THAT'S what people are responding to, because that's the attractor state for any policy that gets made. Law has no room for nuance.
Re: the second point about being "inferior" to other people, I mean the obvious thought is the idea that people/things can be of value in themselves as opposed to their instrumental value that they provide to society/other people, that the inherent value exists without being quantifiable or even on the same scale.
Let me give you an example to try to make this feel more intuitive. Does a mountain, pick one at random, have value? There is a sense in which it makes sense to say that it does. Does the sunset have value? There is a sense in which it makes sense to say that it does. Is the mountain more valuable than the sunset? This feels like a kind of nonsense question to me, even if you acknowledge that both the mountain and the sunset each have value. There is a sense that things having "value" without it being some sort of computable quantity that you can put on a single universal scale. Things can have different sorts of value (each their own kind of value), they can have inherent value that is not instrumental to the good they do for other purposes (in fact, what sort of value could otherwise exist? eventually the buck has to stop somewhere), value doesn't add up to single utility quantity (why should it? aside from the analogy to money--but ways of looking at the world without universal currency are certainly conceivable e.g. barter economy), etc. These are among my problems with utilitarianism.
The utilitarians would respond something like, "Sure, mountain A has value, because it generates person 1 0.5 units of joy, and person 2 mines some minerals from it that gives them 0.25 units of utility" etc. and the same for the sunset, and then they would say there is a definite answer to which gives more utility after doing the math to add them up or apply whatever function, but this just feels quite unsatisfying and silly to me. It seems easier to just say that things have value, just because they do.
IMO, one of the most important function of our higher consciousness, art, philosophy, and everything else, is finding ways to answer the question "Why should I not beat you to death with a rock?" with a NO!
This is why it is important that nobody is inferior to anybody at all ever. If it is possible genuinely rank people; it becomes impossible to answer "Why should I not beat you to death with a rock?" with a no.
The people lower on the ranking not only can but should beat to death with a rock everyone above them; the people high have morall license to beat to death everyone below them. For examples, see all of human history before universalism; a vast collection of various groups who truly believe in the possibility of inferiority, and also felt no compunctions about eg. condemning 200000 french peasants to death out of convenience or ripping each other limb from limb in the street.
So, to answer the question, " are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people?" NO, or I'm gonna start finding a nice heavy rock.
We may be missing some existentialism here. Superior is as superior does. However, since there are many things that superior can do, the key question is: superior for what purpose?
In a totalitarian system, your purpose is assigned to you. When people's lives are defined by their assigned purpose, it's easy to compare how well two people with the same purpose fulfill that purpose, and treat them accordingly. Different purposes may already have a prescribed hierarchical relationship, allowing us to compare apples and oranges when it comes to social calculations.
However, since we thankfully choose not to live in a totalitarian system, we must consider not only how much people contribute to society, but also what trust we want to maintain regarding how people are treated. The way society treats the less fortunate significantly influences how much the less fortunate can trust the rest of society, and vice versa. We need to reconcile the incentives for people to improve with the question of how we want the society we live in to treat the least well off. (My main ethical influences are precedent utilitarianism, and the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance.)
I do think that society should ideally try to cultivate more capable people over time, but the ways in which it does that must build up people's trust rather than damaging that trust by overstepping its range. Humans have already damaged that trust by mistreating those they deemed inferior, and bizarrely enough by deeming people inferior just because they were part of a cultural outgroup that became a scapegoat. The way we treat the less useful decides how afraid people are of the very idea of comparing people's utility in the first place.
If we want to build trust, we might start by committing not to use a person's relative lack of utility as an excuse to sacrifice them to save someone more useful. If in times of desperation we must decide who lives and dies at random rather than by calculated benefit to society, that will incentivize us to take proactive steps to prevent times of desperation. Otherwise, we might be tempted to allow a crisis to happen, which might make society on average stronger on the individual level but with much weaker trust. There would always be someone next in line to be sacrificed to bear the cost of society's malfeasance, and everyone would know whether they would be the ones to face those consequences or not. That does not sound to me like a society that would make good decisions.
To respond to the initial question about embryo selection in the simplified case of cystic fibrosis, I think that given the opportunity to avoid bringing a person into existence whose body would likely frustrate their ambitions significantly more than the average person's body does already and cause them likewise more pain and suffering, it is ethical to take that opportunity. The cost/benefit to society is probably worth considering as well, but if we make a habit of that we start shifting towards totalitarianism. There's no point in a society if its individuals aren't enjoying themselves, so creating individuals who can enjoy themselves can be worthy in itself.
That's my take, anyway. How does that all sound?
I think Scott is very concerned about sounding like a Nazi, but I think he should worry about being Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was an extraordinary guy: fought in some of the worst battles of the Civil War, Supreme Court Justice, terrific prose style, very progressive. And yet! He was very excited about (old school, obv) eugenics to the point he made his opinion in Buck v. Bell into an ad for eugenics.
Or Francis Galton. I'm sure Galton never anticipated, and would have been horrified by, what resulted in the "we have now classified this set of people as sub-human" Nazi camps, but the early Eugenics Movement was the pebble that started the avalanche rolling.
One thing they all agreed on from the start was that not alone were the obvious things like physical and mental illness undesirable and it would be better to have healthy babies without such traits, that got expanded out to "and of course obvious criminal elements", "and of course the very poorest of the poor on the bottom of the social ladder" (what is now called the underclass), "and of course non-whites from certain nations who are still primitives", "and of course those who don't get a sufficiently high social score to be permitted to marry and have children".
Galton was extremely well-meaning, as may be seen by these excerpts from the collected "Essays in Eugenics" of 1909, but even there we may see the difference between what one particular period in time considers "superior" traits and what our current period does, then how much more the likely difference between us and our grandchildren on what are "superior" or "desirable" traits? And if Popular Opinion is going to be the means by which Eugenics is accepted into the mainstream, we should beware of how it is formed and how it is swayed.
From the Preface:
"The power by which Eugenic reform must chiefly be effected, is that of Popular Opinion, which is amply strong enough for that purpose whenever it shall be roused. Public Opinion has done as much as this on many past occasions and in various countries, of which much evidence is given in the Essay on Restrictions in Marriage. It is now ordering our acts more intimately than we are apt to suspect, because the dictates of Public Opinion become so thoroughly assimilated that they seem to be original and individual to those who are guided by them. By comparing the current ideas at widely different epochs and under widely different civilizations we are able to ascertain what part of our convictions is really innate and permanent, and what part has been acquired and is transient.
It is above all things needful for the successful progress of Eugenics that its advocates should move discreetly and claim no more efficacy on its behalf than the future will confirm ; otherwise a re-action will be invited. A great deal of investigation is still needed to shew the limit of practical Eugenics, yet enough has been already determined to justify large efforts to instruct the public in an authoritative way, as to the results hitherto obtained by sound reasoning, applied to the undoubted facts of social experience."
From the essay “Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims”:
"Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage. The improvement of the inborn qualities, or stock, of some one human population, will alone be discussed here.
What is meant by improvement? What by the syllable Eu in Eugenics, whose English equivalent is good ? There is considerable difference between goodness in the several qualities and in that of the character as a whole. The character depends largely on the proportion between qualities whose balance may be much influenced by education. We must therefore leave morals as far as possible out of the discussion, not entangling ourselves with the almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad. Moreover, the goodness or badness of character is not absolute, but relative to the current form of civilisation.
…Though no agreement could be reached as to absolute morality, the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life. In short that it was better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be. So with men. There are a vast number of conflicting ideals of alternative characters, of incompatible civilisations ; but all are wanted to give fulness and interest to life. Society would be very dull if every man resembled the highly estimable Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede. The aim of Eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens ; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilisation in their own way.
A considerable list of qualities can be easily compiled that nearly every one except “cranks” would take into account when picking out the best specimens of his class. It would include health, energy, ability,manliness and courteous disposition. Recollect that the natural differences between dogs are highly marked in all these respects, and that men are quite as variable by nature as other animals in their respective species. Special aptitudes would be assessed highly by those who possessed them, as the artistic faculties by artists, fearlessness of inquiry and veracity by scientists, religious absorption by mystics, and so on. There would be self-sacrificers, self-tormentors and other exceptional idealists, but the representatives of these would be better members of a community than the body of their electors. They would have more of those qualities that are needed in a State, more vigour, more ability, and more consistency of purpose. The community might be trusted to refuse representatives of criminals, and of others whom it rates as undesirable.
…Persistence in setting forth the national importance of Eugenics.
There are three stages to be passed through. Firstly it must be made familiar as an academic question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as a fact; Secondly it must be recognised as a subject whose practical development deserves serious consideration ; and Thirdly it must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction; just as it is his duty to succour neighbours who suffer misfortune. The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt. We are ignorant of the ultimate destinies of humanity, but feel perfectly sure that it is as noble a work to raise its level in the sense already explained, as it would be disgraceful to abase it. I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out sedulously in the study. Over-zeal leading to hasty action would do harm, by holding out expectations of a near golden age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to be discredited. The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study. Then let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly foresee."
Yes, it's that "we may not wholly foresee" that is the kicker there!
This seems like the vastly least interesting argument against genetic embryo screening. I want to hear about inbreeding, zero-sum/tragedy of the commons dynamics (e.g. taller people are more attractive, but mostly when compared to other, less tall people, and if everyone is 2m50 and can barely walk it would be bad), the way we're letting the future of human genetics be decided by the requirements of current society which has a lot of faults (imagine burnout-resistance genes or just docility and work ethic, etc..), the idea that genes may work together in different combinations with positive effects in some and negative in others (e.g. genes that make some people schizophrenic also make some other people geniuses), the conflict of interest between what parents want for their kids and what the kids want for themselves...
To focus on "some people feel bad about this but their feelings are irrational anyway" is way too easy an out.
Being tall is only attractive up to a certain point; people taller than that end up looking weird because their proportions start to get "off". As such, I wouldn't expect human height to increase infinitely.
Moreover, you are assuming that beauty is relative, but I think it actually isn't; if everyone was a 5/5, everyone would just be a 5/5. That might seem weird, but... is it? Like, if you take a bunch of attractive people, and stick them together, the least attractive of them does not become ugly.
As for the other things:
I think we're going to have to forcibly disassemble or destroy all authoritarian societies in the next 200 years, which is going to reduce or eliminate a lot of these concerns, as what really optimizes you to work in our society is being smart and prosocial. "Docility/passiveness" is not a positive trait from an economic POV; you want workers who are actively seeking out better opportunities.
What you do want to get rid of is a genetic predisposition towards violence, but that appears to be negative anyway, because studies on such people shows negative life outcomes on average.
"Nobody can make you feel genetically inferior without your consent" - until the laws get re-written in line with social attitudes changing.
The idea that, well, it will just go on continuing to be that people get nicer and nicer and society gets more liberal and we don't need to worry about sorting out inferior and superior unless we're strictly talking about embryo selection to do away with what all agree are nasty things like cystic fibrosis - I don't believe that.
Don't make assumptions about "well all right-thinking people now accept this, so this is the way it will stay forever".
Up to my early adulthood, we used to have Corpus Christi processions in town. Once upon a time, they processed all through the streets and ended up in the main square and there were Army guards and the like.
Gradually that dwindled away until now the 'procession' is held within the church on the day.
Instead, this week in the local park, we're going to have the Pride Festival for the third year. That is now the kind of new, major, public celebration for all to engage in and all accept the philosophical underpinnings of the beliefs.
Date of Corpus Christi - usually but not always in June as it is a moveable feast
Date of Pride Festival - 15th June this year
Attitudes change. Fixed beliefs change. You can't forecast that twenty or fifty years down the line, people won't accept that "genetically inferior" means "morally inferior as well". That's why I'm digging my heels in and making such a fuss over the likes of "really unsatisfying claims about legal systems" and "utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense", because if we just leave it up to Common Sense and Science-Based, we *will* end up with 'Lance *is* superior to you, so not alone would any reasonable person give him the parachute, they would not blame him for pushing you out of the plane without one'.
Start giving in on the "well this isn't really based on anything more than vague sentiment" and you'll find yourself free-falling through the clouds as you plummet to earth without a parachute, and all the "this was never intended to be the outcome!" in the world won't save you.
People generally don't claim you're morally inferior because you got cancer. It just sucks.
It's the same thing with genetics. You can't choose what genetics you have. Got cystic fibrosis? Sucks to be you.
Having better genes is pure upside, just like how being beautiful and smart is. Because those things are caused by genes. In fact, a lot of good things are caused by genes.
Having more good things is good.
Having fewer good things is bad.
This is not a moral judgement on the person. It's an evaluation of things.
Being disabled is worse than not being disabled.
Depends on your cancer; lung cancer because you were a heavy smoker? Your own fault, and people like that should be let die instead of clogging up the health system and taking resources from those who really need them.
https://www.cancer.ie/about-us/news/irish-cancer-society-welcomes-report-on-economic-cost-of-smoking
Type 2 diabetes? Obviously you got that from being fat and lazy.
Plenty of examples where there is moral judgement for health conditions.
Part of it, I think, is a defence mechanism - if Bill got cancer out of the blue, then that means it could happen to me, too, for no reason! But if Bill got cancer because he smoked/drank/ate junk food, then that's okay - it's Bill's fault, he made bad choices because he's worse than me, *I* don't drink/smoke/eat junk food so *I* won't get sick, because I'm a good and upright person who has self-control and isn't a fat, lazy, blob.
It's a moral hazard.
If you get in a bunch of car accidents, you have to pay more for insurance than people who don't get in a bunch of car accidents.
That's how insurance works. If you are deliberately doing things that put you in a higher risk category, you *should* be paying more.
When you DON'T do that, it creates problems.
When you have a publicly subsidized system, then you create moral hazards for people, because you have people who are doing things that put them at much higher risk, and yet, their problems are being subsidized by everyone else. That IS an issue, and it's not unfair for people to feel put upon or burdened when people make choices that cause problems and then expect other people to fix them.
This is why we ban drugs. Drugs cause a lot of problems for everyone else in society and put burdens on them, because drug addicts can't take care of themselves in many cases. This means people who want to use recreational drugs responsibly get upset because they aren't allowed to use Drug X, but at the same time, other people are like "Drug X causes way more people to get cancer and to beat their wives and commit crimes and get in car crashes".
The other solution is to tax the hell out of them so they have to pay for the burdens they create. But there's limits on that and then people get upset when the people who violate the law and sell untaxed drugs illegally get in trouble, even though they absolutely deserve to get in trouble for it.
You (and other readers) may be interested interested in the concept of a “linguistic intervention”, which describes this sort of case where we say things like “people with disabilities are just like everyone else” or, in your case, “having a genetic disease doesn’t make you inferior”, as a form of conceptual activism that is used to promote a social goal (such as increasing respect and empathy for people with these disabilities/diseases).
The term is described in this paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2019.1658630
>“linguistic intervention”
Also known as language policing, one of my least favorite aspect of Woke. I like this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2g2oE0Q6fc It describes language policing at the University of Waterloo.
Were you able to access and read the paper?
Many Thanks! Only partially, the abstract and the footnotes.
Ah, sorry, here’s a link to an open paper which actually describes linguistic interventions and their importance and the reasoning behind them: https://philarchive.org/rec/STELIA-6
I think you’re partially right: I believe that language policing is a type of linguistic intervention, but linguistic interventions are not equivalent to language policing.
Linguistic interventions are a *larger category* that describe when people try to introduce new words, change the meaning of existing words, or change the words in circulation.
Language policing is a type of linguistic intervention that attempts to change the words in circulation.
I watched your video (thank you for sharing it!), but I was confused by a few things:
1. The level of punishment that the university actually issues to student who use the unrecommended words. The YouTuber seemed to be hyping up the consequences, but I didn’t see any references to real discipline brought about by students using the unrecommended words
2. Whether the university is punishing students solely because of the use of those words (language policing), or because of the meaning and emotional impact of those words (closer to something like “social” policing, where if someone says something that causes stress among many (e.g. a threat or a slur), it is reasonable to punish that action in order to discourage it)
3. In what scenarios would the unrecommended words carry the meaning that the writer actually wants to convey? I didn’t watch the entire video, but most of the word changes didn’t seem like they would really change the meaning of what the writer wanted to say, unless the writer explicitly *wanted* to use a term with a far more negative connotation/background.
Here are some of my more general thoughts:
I generally think it’s very reasonable for a college to create a policy along the lines of: “Swear words in papers are generally not appropriate because they have an often unwanted impact on readers. Here is a list of swear words and words you might want to replace your swear words with. If you use swear words in a paper, please be warned that your grader may find this inappropriate and may penalize you accordingly.”
I see a similar thing going on here, where the non-recommended words carry weight and impact that students may not be aware of, and students using those words may not realize that they come off as racist, etc.
Thus, having the list makes it clear to students what words they might want to avoid.
What the list is missing, however, is the reasoning *behind* why one might want to avoid using those words. I think adding that might help better inform students.
All that said, I do understand the risks of language policing, and I hope that the university does too; thus, I hope that the university is merely providing guidelines and awareness, rather than imposing a rule and explicitly restricting speech. It wasn’t clear from the video if that is in fact the case or if the YouTuber (who does not attend that university and is distanced from Canadian culture) was overstating the situation and consequences.
I’d appreciate any thoughts you may have on linguistic interventions (especially the paper I linked which I have not read through fully), my confusions about the video, or my more general thoughts.
Many Thanks! Yes, I can get to Professor Sterken's paper. Yes, I agree that language policing is a subset of linguistic interventions. I _don't_ like the portion of the interventions such as Sterkin's
>Sometimes having certain word-meaning pairs in circulation in a population of speakers at a particular time, in a particular social-historical milieu, can be bad. Such word-meaning pairs might cause injustice or disadvantage, stifle discourse, deliberation and inquiry, or stall social progress. It’s not hard to think of examples – take any slur. The population would be better off without such word-meaning pairs.
Construing a term with a negative association as a slur, and penalizing its use, is a political act of censorship that I oppose. For instance (writing from the USA), "illegal immigrant" refers to someone who really _did_ violate the law in the process of immigrating, and I support the use of this term to acknowledge this fact.
I don't oppose factions coining new terms or phrases. As long as there is no coercion being applied, people can choose to use additional terms as they see fit.
I'm not thrilled to see new euphemisms, since they are used to conceal actions or conditions or identities that would, unconcealed, often prompt disapproval. I suspect that government and corporate PR departments are probably as bad or worse than political factions in this regard.
I'm ambivalent about factions modifying the meaning of existing terms. The left has generalized "racist" so broadly that the term effectively just mean "human" at this point. This leaves everyone in a quandry about what to call e.g. white or black supremacists.
( As an aside, I find it somewhat funny to see certain types of attempted coinings fail. There have been several attempts to coin neutral terms for someone stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot, for instance, was originally intended as a neutral technical term. It became a term of derision. I'll hazard a prediction that _any_ analogous future term will fare similarly. )
( As a second aside, Sterken's pervasive use of "ameliorator" to mean a person who is trying to change the language drives me up the wall. Frankly, I doubt that even _she_ actually intends the positive connotations of that term to apply to all of the examples that she gave. A more neutral term, e.g. "modifier", would not have grated on my nerves as much. )
>Interventionists even risk detrimentally undermining the functioning of the language system, or they may end up silencing themselves
Yup! If members of a faction modify the meanings of the terms they use far enough from the ordinary meanings, a common reaction from people outside their faction to their speech may become "I have no idea what you are talking about." . Less drastically, in technical contexts, jargon and "terms of art" are often used with special meanings, e.g. "group", "field", "residue", and "pole" in mathematics. In those contexts, writers or speakers generally make it glaringly obvious that they intend to use the specialized meaning, not the ordinary meaning.
Personally, I regard "undermining the functioning of the language system" as a hostile act, damaging a commons that we all depend on.
>I watched your video (thank you for sharing it!), but I was confused by a few things: 1. The level of punishment that the university actually issues to student who use the unrecommended words. The YouTuber seemed to be hyping up the consequences, but I didn’t see any references to real discipline brought about by students using the unrecommended words
Many Thanks! Yes, I am also uncertain what level of punishment the university actually imposes on students using the terms it doesn't like.
>but most of the word changes didn’t seem like they would really change the meaning of what the writer wanted to say
One of the most glaring examples of a forced change is at 6:40 in the video, the change from "minority" to "equity deserving groups". That changes the meaning from a neutral statistical fact, that some group is less than 50% of the population, to a compelled, _very_ political, policy endorsement.
Thanks for the detailed reply!
>Construing a term with a negative association as a slur, and penalizing its use, is a political act of censorship that I oppose. For instance (writing from the USA), "illegal immigrant" refers to someone who really _did_ violate the law in the process of immigrating, and I support the use of this term to acknowledge this fact.
I agree with you that a term should not be given a negative connotation and be penalized for its usage out of thin air. However, I think the extent to which this happens is exceedingly rare.
I think one thing we might disagree about is who has the right to say that a word is harmful and penalize its usage. I imagine in many of these cases, people have experienced discrimination in association with these words, and so the words have taken on meaning beyond their literal interpretation. For example, calling someone an "illegal immigrant" likely also carries baggage of questioning their belonging and a hidden threat of deportation, in a way that saying "this person who entered the country without following our customs, but is an integral part of our community" does not. The term "illegal immigrant" carries with it a sort of stigma and threat that other wording likely would not. If you want to explicitly specify that they entered illegally, you could replace "without following our customs" with "illegally", and it would still come off differently and make people feel more comfortable.
Now, if your goal is to insinuate that illegal immigrants in the community you're speaking to don't belong and should be deported, then I think your use of the term is likely warranted. However, that's a really scary threat to insinuate, especially on a campus where some of the students or their families may have entered the country illegally. So I think it makes sense for a university to say that that language should likely not be used.
In short, I think I likely disagree with you about the amount of coercion being applied when stating that a word is harmful.
My guess is that our core disagreement here is that we differ on the populations that are allowed to make a word be considered "harmful". I could be wrong, but my hunch is that you believe that in order for a word to be considered harmful, it should be *generally* considered to be harmful. I tend to believe that in order for a word to be considered harmful, only the population harmed by that word (in an environment where they are comfortable to speak their real thoughts) needs to say that it's harmful. To put this dichotomy into practice, my hunch is that you believe something along the lines of: because "illegal immigrant" doesn't *generally* seem to carry all that much stigma or be that hurtful, universities should not warn about usage of that term. Whereas my stance is closer to: illegal immigrants, when talking amongst themselves, agree that when people use the term "illegal immigrant", it's usually emotionally harmful; therefore, in an environment that may include illegal immigrants, it makes sense to warn people and penalize them for using language that is particularly stigmatizing and harmful for people in the community. My guess is that you likely view my case as being a form of "coercion" because that stigma isn't generally agreed upon.
Is that kind of the root of our disagreement, or am I jumping to incorrect conclusions?
What I think we both agree on is that people should be able to say these words without large governmental organizations (country/state-level) penalizing it. (Am I right that we agree there?)
Where I think we might differ is in the freedom of smaller communities to penalize certain language use, how strong those penalties should be, and (as described above) how communities should decide what language to penalize.
>I'm ambivalent about factions modifying the meaning of existing terms. The left has generalized "racist" so broadly that the term effectively just mean "human" at this point. This leaves everyone in a quandry about what to call e.g. white or black supremacists.
I'm going to purposely skip over some smaller points like this that I don't think will be helpful for us to discuss in detail, but if you think that this is a critical discussion, I'm open to hearing arguments as to why.
>( As a second aside, Sterken's pervasive use of "ameliorator" to mean a person who is trying to change the language drives me up the wall. Frankly, I doubt that even _she_ actually intends the positive connotations of that term to apply to all of the examples that she gave. A more neutral term, e.g. "modifier", would not have grated on my nerves as much. )
Agreed; I think she's doing a bit of her own linguistic intervention here to give this a bit more of a positive social justice spin that detracts from the clarity of the philosophy.
>Personally, I regard "undermining the functioning of the language system" as a hostile act, damaging a commons that we all depend on.
Reading a bit more of the paper, I think Sterken would likely agree with you. She herself calls the specific type of linguistic interventions she's discussing "linguistic transgression[s]" (pg 8). However, she then goes on to point out that these transgressions may be justified by the benefits they bring to the linguistic community.
I think this is similar (though clearly not what she's talking about - penalizing term usage is not the sort of linguistic transgression she's talking about in that section) to how I laid out above that penalizing the use of the term "illegal immigrants" might create a better environment for members of a linguistic community who entered (or had family who entered) the country illegally.
In short, I think you're right that these actions are hostile to the existing communication, and may cause confusion and miscommunication. But I also think they also may have long-term benefits to members of the linguistic community that may justify causing that initial confusion and miscommunication.
>One of the most glaring examples of a forced change is at 6:40 in the video, the change from "minority" to "equity deserving groups". That changes the meaning from a neutral statistical fact, that some group is less than 50% of the population, to a compelled, _very_ political, policy endorsement.
I agree, that's a huge shift in meaning and they should probably see if there's a better replacement term that doesn't carry the same implications as "equity deserving groups" does. I think the meaning there has shifted far too much for it to be a reasonable drop-in replacement.
Have I seemed to identify our main points of agreement and disagreement? Either way, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts. Thanks again for the detailed reply and discussion.
I think I struggle to accept that lance really is good at everything but even if he is I'm not sure that it makes sense to use the word inferior for the rest of us. People ascribe value to different things in life and not just to IQ or strength. It's going to depend on what you value and how others make you feel. Example: I'm in a serious relationship and you show me a woman with a higher iq and a a higher level of attractiveness than my partner. Would it make sense for me to call her superior? To me the answer is no, this new person doesn't make me feel the way my current partner does. Does this person know how to make me laugh? I think with things like the medical condition described in the post it's a bit easier to agree on screening that out. What is harder is things like personality or being wierd or a little on the spectrum. Selecting a world of lances would make for a much worse blogging and twitter experience.
That utterly undefinable spiritual equality thing is not actually that hard to state for a Buddhist:
Both your and Lance's suffering deserves equal compassion, in measure to the amount of suffering, regardless of whose body that suffering is in. That is it. That is the sense (and the only fundamental sense) in which you are equal.
Sure, an impartial judge might save Lance in the plane situation. That is fine and correct. Presumably your wife would save you, and Lance's partner would save Lance. That is also fine and correct. We are not impartial judges, and we should not be impartial judges in situations where we are not impartial. Besides, these all have nothing to do with the fact that you both get equal compassion for all the hardships you go through in life.
Also yea, let's cure cystic fibrosis.
Next question please.
This appears to be a case of judgement vs. assessment framing.
This article is trying to convert judgements into assessments, which I'd argue is more of a category error than a philosophical one.
The concept of 'superiority' itself is a flawed and dangerous one because it assumes that value is one dimensional. The mistake of the Nazis was not that they made distinctions in quality at all; it was that they arrogantly assumed that they had already mapped all the dimensions of quality that matter, even while neglecting the importance of diversification to remain adaptive long term in a complex evolving environment. No finite system, no matter how intelligent, would ever be sane to believe it has already mapped all the dimensions of value that will matter for long term success. So it is a cultural virtue to practice humility in evaluating the value of one's allies. We can usefully make distinctions about the value we believe different people to have in some bounded context (including the entire present world economy, say - though distinctions in value at that scale would warrant very large error bars), but it will always be a mistake to jump to a state of total conviction about the relative value between any two agents in absolute terms.
Could we all perhaps try to admit that the ethical problem with NAZIs is not in them recognizing that some human trait X is less desirable in (almost) all circumstances than trait Y but in them going "Let's kill all people with X! Muahahaha!"?
As long as we do not manage to admit that we will keep tieing ourselves into epistemic knots to maintain doublethink in any place the above proposition is even partially true, which IMHO is really undignified for a movement who's core value is to unflinchingly look at the truth.
You are correct, but the Nazi problem is that it demonstrates that it is indeed entirely possible for some set of people to go from "We all agree that human trait X is less desirable" to "Let's kill all people with X!"
That's the Lebensunwertes Leben Problem, and we don't have any sure-fire way of making sure it won't happen again, since it did happen not just in Nazi Germany (the infamous Carrie Buck case with Oliver Wendell Holmes for one instance). It's very, very easy, unpleasantly so, for humans to go "if X is a bad thing, then having X is a bad thing, then we should get rid of X, then people who have X are bad, then we should get rid of those people". We already are too prone to talk about "IQ 90 normies" and "productive, creative people who grow the economy" and the rest of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life
"The poster says: "This person who suffers a hereditary disease has a lifelong cost of 60,000 Reichsmarks to the National Community. Fellow German, that is your money as well."
Again, see abortion rates of Down's Syndrome foetuses.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-51658631
https://www.irishtimes.com/health/2022/12/26/rotunda-master-says-95-of-parents-of-babies-diagnosed-with-down-syndrome-choose-abortion/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10031387/
And it starts with language like this, where the pro-amendment slant of the piece (on the Irish campaign as to whether or not to amend our Constitution to permit limited abortion) does - "it's not a baby, it's a foetus":
https://www.thejournal.ie/factcheck-babies-abortion-3823611-Feb2018/
"The NDSCR annual report does not use the word “babies” or “baby“, but refers to “prenatal diagnosis” and uses the words “pregnancies” and “fetal”.
The use of the word ‘baby’ is significant as there is currently a case before the Supreme Court on the meaning of the word ‘unborn’ in the Constitution.
A ruling by the High Court in 2016 found that references to the “unborn” in the Constitution meant an unborn child. Now the Supreme Court is to examine the ruling, in which judge Richard Humphreys ruled that the use of the word “unborn” in Bunreacht na hÉireann meant an “unborn child”, with the unborn’s rights extending beyond the right to life.
While the Supreme Court wrestles with this, currently the word ‘baby’ is typically used to refer to a child that has been born. Under dictionary definitions, ‘baby’ refers to an ‘extremely young child’.
In essence, while the poster uses the word ‘baby’, what it really means is ‘unborn child’ or ‘foetus’."
You see? 'This entity with the undesirable trait is not quite human, or not yet at least, and not really fully human the way normal people like you and I are'. And so if we do away with these less-humans, then it's not murder, it's just... being compassionate. Or eugenics for the good of society as a whole. Or ending a life that will only be one of misery and pain.
"Let's kill all people with X because they're not really people!" is the sugar-coated pill that we are persuaded to swallow, as per that news article:
"The statement on the billboard poster is:
In Britain, 90% of babies with Down Syndrome are aborted.
On a basic level, the statement does not clarify that the 90% rate refers to prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome.
In order to be fully correct, the poster could say:
In England and Wales, 90% of pregnancies with prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome are terminated.
The statistic of 90% is correct when referring to prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome.
However, this is not a clarification available to members of the public passing by these billboards."
"On a basic level, the statement does not clarify that the 90% rate refers to prenatally diagnosed Down syndrome."
Abortion happens prenatally by definition.
The inverse of the Nazi problem is the Commie problem, and given that disparities in life outcomes exist and are currently seen as undesirable, you either acknowledge the reality of genetic impacts on those outcomes (Nazi-leaning) or you don't (Commie-leaning.) Genocide is bad, (I say, cueing applause,) but eradicating the fit is still worse than eradicating the unfit, so... if you have to chose language that could be twisted into justifying one versus justifying the other, I think you need to err in favour of preventing the former.
Also, the commie-preventing statement happens to be true. I think that counts for something.
"Again, see abortion rates of Down's Syndrome foetuses" - Out of curiosity, do you object to abortion in general, or would you cease objecting if the foetus in question was entirely healthy and neurotypical?
I am surprised Scott missed and answer I think his obvious : He is equal to Lance in terms of moral consideration of his interest.
His interest (as the interest of any other humans or animals) should have the same weight.
It doesn't mean we should not prefer to save Lance, just that we should save Lance because we are also weighing the interest of the other persons he will help.
Also, this is also what is bad about saying someone is genetically inferior, because it could mean "his interests are inferiors, we should weight them less", and it is exactly what racist do.
"his interests are inferiors, we should weight them less", and it is exactly what racist do.
Perhaps. Racists sometimes act as if they are giving some people a moral value that isn't just lower, it's negative.
Yes, but I think this is very rare, this would be a really extreme level of racism.
The point of establishing generically superior or inferior people is for the superior to rule over the inferior. They use science and metrics because there is this idea of science of impartial objective judge; this way there can be no doubt, as Science is as close to god or priests as anything in a functionally atheistic world.
it's just a version of "i have divine/royal blood and so i am fit to rule" dressed up in the modern lingo. For all their intellect, people make the same errors and just dress it up in new language.
Premise (1): Genetics can cause people to differ in intelligence, happiness, success, contribution to society, etc. in predictable and (in principle) modifiable ways.
Premise (2): There's no useful way to frame the question "am I inferior?" such that less intelligent, less happy, less successful, less socially useful people can honestly answer "no".
Progressives generally deny premise (1). Traditionalists generally deny premise (2). You deny... neither? And you think that's... okay?
I wanted to believe you had some other way out of the conclusion. But this post convinces me you don't. You embrace it. You come right out and say that your life should be weighted less than Lance's in the ethical balance, even to the point of choosing which one of you should die. You just DON'T THINK THAT'S BAD. And then you act offended when other people say it's really bad, and try to hold you to the implications of your own worldview!
Look, I despise a lot of the flak the rationalist / EA community gets from progressives. The intellectual injustice of those criticisms viscerally offends and upsets me. But if you accept (1) AND (2) then you deserve all the opprobrium they're throwing at you and then some. You're trying to take a morally monstrous position and spin it as "yeah, but the nice medicalized version of that, not the thing you all want to cancel." This IS what they want to cancel! And for good reason!
You've expressed sympathy for "positive eugenics" in the past, and disappointment that it got associated with Nazi-style eugenics. THIS IS WHY THEY'RE ASSOCIATED! In a utilitarian framework nothing but situational pragmatic considerations lets you distinguish the two! The world is not about to let you get away with obfuscating this because you don't like the PR. And rightly so!
Anyway, this is the post I'll be linking all my normie friends to when I need a quick demonstration of why we need deontology.
In the hetrozygous condition, the CF gene provides some protection against Diptheria, much like the Sickle Cell Trait does with Malaria.
This article honestly makes you sound like a Nazi (metaphorically speaking) who doesn't want to be tricked into admitting it.
I do not understand this post. If you have no good argument / explanation for why you are not inferior (and a prima facie good one for why you might be) then you should accept that you probably are. The arguments offered here seem to amount to 'I don't want to be cancelled' and 'it would make me feel sad'. These are not good reasons for believing something (e.g. apply them to something like believing in god).
This seems especially weird when there are (I think) better arguments that would address a concern over 'genetic inferiority' that are not offered: genetic superiority / inferiority is not very important given everything else that makes you up; measurement is arbitrary (is it from your genes' perspective, society, which society?); other people's good fortune does not make you worse off.
Scott, your distinction between “being worse” versus “being inferior” works with regard to some ethical questions related to the life situation of people with cystic fibrosis (and people like Lance), but not with regard to other, perhaps more pressing, ethical questions.
To specify the problem, the actors, and the means available to them:
(1) Is the perceived problem to make people with cystic fibrosis (or being less attractive than good-looking Lance), to stop feeding their inner I-am-worthless demon?
(2) And are you (qua a psychiatrist) the actor paid by someone to help achieve this?
…(3) Then, sure, choosing words aimed at telling the patient that he/she/they are not inferior to anybody else (although they may be “worse” among several or all dimensions), seems like a fruitful cognitive-type strategy to achieve this aim.
This is the (1) problem, (2) the actor, and (3) the choice of strategy where the different ways to word the problem - not as “being inferior”, but rather as “being worse but not inferior” - is a relevant distinction to emphasize. As you write: “The problem with claiming that Lance is superior to me isn’t that he isn’t. It’s that it indicates I’m asking the wrong question to try to trick myself into being miserable..... the correct answer to “am I inferior to Lance?” is “haha, you can’t trick me into using the word that lets you make me depressed.””
…But there are other problems & other actors & other types of means related to cystic fibrosis, and to Lance. Where the ethical questions related to (1) what is the problem, (2) who are the actors/decision-makers, and (3) what are fruitful interventions, are unrelated to the “being worse” versus “being inferior” distinction.
Let me illustrate, first related to people with cystic fibrosis:
1. Should parents have the right to abort fetuses with cystic fibrosis? That is, should parents be the ones who have the right to decide if a fetus with cystic fibrosis is born or not? Notice that their decision is not dependent on whether they think a person with cystic fibrosis is “inferior” to others; it is enough if they regard him/her as likely to have a sufficiently bad life, including making life sufficiently worse for parents, that it tips the balance in the fetus’ disfavor.
If we are in a country where abortion is legal, we need further specifications of “what is the problem, who is to decide, and what means can they use”:
1a. Should it be legal for parents to take the tests that can determine if a fetus has cystic fibrosis (or other genetic disorders)?
1b. (stronger) Should governments subsidize the test?
…From cystic fibrosis, we can move on to your other examples: Schizophrenia and low IQ. And further to Trisomy 21. And so on.
Second, regarding good-looking Lance versus the rest of us:
2. If the question is if Lance, you, me, or any other ACX reader should get the single parachute, I am on your side: Let’s give it to Lance. Because we need more good-looking men with insufferably high self-confidence. We are collectively the decision-makers, and as the plane goes down we agree that although Lance is not superior to us he is better than us, so please take our only parachute.
But what if the problem is something else, and where the decision-makers are someone else than us? For example, suppose none of us can get laid, because the Lances of the world are deemed more attractive by those who decide who gets laid, i.e. women? It is small comfort if women assure us that they do not regard us as inferior to Lance, only as worse than Lance. Since the outcome of their decision boils down to the same thing.
If we are in a country where women are allowed to decide who they sleep with, we have a similar list of more specified real-life problems, actors, and policy means, unrelated to whether the decision-makers regard others than Lance as “inferior” or merely as “worse”. Such as:
2a. Should people who cannot get laid (= are regarded as “inferior” or “worse” than Lance) at least have the right to Ersatz sex, i.e. should pornography be legal?
2b. Should people who cannot get laid also have access to paid sex? I.e. should prostitution be legal?
2c. Should the government actively help people who cannot get laid? In order to approach a situation where someone being regarded by decision-makers as either “inferior” or “worse” than Lance and his ilk, does not result in they totally missing the goods that the decision-makers otherwise dish out? For example, by letting government-paid social workers facilitate contact with prostitutes, or to show clients how to masturbate? (Practiced to some extent in Denmark related to people with severe disabilities, including severe cognitive impairments.)
…all of the above just to illustrate that many (most?) ethical questions concerning 1) what should be regarded as the problem, 2) who should be the decision-makers related to it, and 3) what means the decision-makers should be allowed to use to deal with it, are not resolved by making a distinction between what it means to say that someone is “worse” than someone else, versus what it means to say that someone is “inferior” to someone else.
But if we limit attention to therapeutic situations then, sure, maybe it helps one's ego to perceive oneself not as “inferior” but merely as “worse” than others....
In general, there are almost no rules which are valid across all possible aggregation functions. Conflict on these questions occurs when someone generalizes the rule until they find an aggregation function which violates it.
When specifying a rule, be as specific about the aggregation function as possible, and then build upwards, e.g. is Lance bigger? under the aggregation "bigger" is easily measured; then simply accumulate aggregation functions which satisfy the rules rather than start with the generic "better" and work downward.
The question "is group A better than group B "is toxic, but "is group A taller than group B" is not. There is a further set of conflict related to the definition of the rule, and this is the source of the problem with "smarter" or "better". The general public does not agree with the concept of a generic "smarter" or "better", so we get journalists that exploit this gap with questions like the ones you mention.