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SoylentRox t1_j4p3nat wrote

Reply to comment by arachnivore in Singularity Mods removed this post about Nick Bostrom defending eugenics by arachnivore

Umm, think this came up a few days ago on here.

I support eugenics if the consequences of not doing it are significant and well known.

Like, it's one thing if your 'master race' is buncha people of a particular appearance who are still just humans and capable of losing.

On the other hand, if the edits make people, say:

(1) live for centuries (2) regenerate limbs (3) they are all smarter than the smartest people who ever lived (4) they are better in every sport all the time, with modified tissue that gives them superhuman strength and toughness (5) They all look like models, from age 15 to age 950.

Once you are talking about such vast improvements - something a super-intelligence could likely work out exactly how to do in a matter of a few years once one exists - it's arguably dooming any unedited child to, well, being retarded, ugly, and dead at 80.

In that situation, your "principals" have a crippling and large cost to someone not yet born.

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arachnivore OP t1_j4p447n wrote

You've completely ignored the whole part of Eugenics that makes it fraught with problems:

>Why impose your decisions on an entire race of people? Why not let individuals choose for themselves what traits they want or don't want?

I've repeated this so so so many times. It's not rocket science.

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SoylentRox t1_j4p4loq wrote

For the same reason we make parents vaccinate their children and send them to school. Because we know what happens if you don't do that.

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arachnivore OP t1_j4p5pyf wrote

Jesus christ. There's a line between keeping your children from dying and dictating the color of their skin. Somewhere in the middle there is complicated ground where the answer isn't so clear if something is for the good of a child or eugenics and that definitely deserves discussion, but it's not this bullshit of:

>Hurr! durr! Transhumanism = Eugenics! Hurr! Durr!

That everyone in this post is replying to me with like a bunch of lobotomized dipshits.

The problem is: The mods seem to think burying discussion about the problems of eugenics is a good idea and Nick Bostrom seems to think the main problem is that its frowned upon in academia when you act like a huge bigot, use racial slurs, and spout debunked Nazi "science".

Like, yeah Nick, I'm sure we'd be making way more progress in the field if we just let a bunch of racist trolls publish their "work". That must really be the biggest problem facing the field. \s

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