It doesn't seem clear to me at all that this guy was JUST interested in supporting science.
Epstein's intrest in eugenics is pretty well documented. I don't think it's a stretch to think his special interest in funding an evolution research team at Harvard was directly related to his abhorrent views. Sure his funding probably has had some higher order positive effects but it seems incredibly silly to suggest that such a monsterous person was donating all this money becuase of his passion for science. His constant oversight suggests that he probably had an agenda and use in mind for the research and I find it incredibly hard to believe it was anything good/humanitarian. You also have to keep in mind this is not just a guy with bad views, this is a person who has wielded money and power to directly cause evil for a very long time.
There is no doubt that 'any' patron to science expect to see certain results, whether that someone or some organization's expectations matches ours is another matter. The difference should be drawn with fabricating results, not donation to science
This is a dangerously wrong and even ignorant opinion. There is everything wrong with eugenics, and it’s all contained in the core idea that you have some notion of what is “good” for your children (and correspondingly, further parts of the human race). Other people have already pointed out the “eugenics will be used for political gain” component, which is absolutely true and kills it there. Another issue which I don’t think you appreciate though is the need for genetic diversity and genetic drift. The act of going about systematically pushing everyone’s genes in a certain direction is not only impractical, since we really don’t know enough about genetics to do that reasonably well, it’s also incredibly stupid because we’re getting a temporary “positive” payoff now by potentially screwing up our ability to adapt later. Mistakes are the spice of life, literally; don’t try to get rid of them, you’ll only hurt yourself.
1) even if we were all-knowing about what we’ll need in the future, we still don’t know enough about genetics to reliably “push” towards a set goal. Yes we know genetics plays a huge role in things like your body condition, your age, etc., but the degree to which those genes affect - and are affected by - your environment and at what stages they begin working, and where we should alter them, is so far almost completely unknown. Eugenics is grounded in the old idea that much of “you” is just genetics, but we know that idea now to be not just old-fashioned but outright wrong, in that there is a combinatorial number of possibilities enabled by your environment. It’s like calling the codebase of google search the same as the discord codebase because they’re both made of underlying C code (or whatever); technically true but also not true at all.
2)we really don’t have any idea what we should be pushing towards. Maybe right now we think that pushing towards greater strength, for example, would be a good idea, but maybe down the road we discover that one of the genes we made dominant actually makes us very susceptible to some virus strain, overall making the population die at a much higher rate compared to how things would have gone if we had not tried to play god. There are many, many variables you can’t even begin to account for; I find the words “Life finds a way” remarkably suitable to this discussion.
>If we provide the ability for people to select partners with some precision about what genes they carry and what might be passed to their offspring,
this is what's potentially wrong with eugenics, in the abstract there is nothing wrong with being able to choose genetic traits, but it will be left to the prejudices and ill-informed opinions of people not to mention fashion. Many traits that do not have anything to do with smarter, healthier and stronger humans would be selected for or selected against skewing the population unnaturally.
Would this have any deleterious effect - not sure. After all if it doesn't directly effect having smarter, healthier, or stronger humans what is the harm in - let's have an example - having red hair and freckles suddenly cut from the gene pool by 3/4ths? Probably no harm, maybe the redheads out there will be upset that there is sort of genetic vote to eliminate them, but they'll get over it or just get old and die so what's the harm?
on edit: to clarify - verged into sarcasm with my ending example as obviously I do think it would be harmful, although I can't really show with any certainty that I am correct, and just as obviously don't know that my scenario would happen - if it did I expect it would not be because most people chose against having redheaded children but rather for having other types of characteristics.
Eugenics is tricky. It is a complex field with legitimate and valuable data that can be used to help people, but can also be used for harm.
Nobody would wish cystic fibrosis, huntington's disease, or downs syndrome on their children, but that doesn't mean carriers don't deserve respect and dignity. The tricky part is how to promote healthier, happier, and smarter children without denigrating others.
> The tricky part is how to promote healthier, happier, and smarter children without denigrating others.
That's not tricky. It can't be done. If you want to admit that smarter children are desirable, you have to also admit that dumber children are undesirable. You can hope nobody notices, but they will notice.
Well, there's all this is intelligence equivalent to doing well on IQ tests and different kinds of intelligence debate going on in the culture for the last decade or two, and then there does seem to be a history in the U.S at least of undervaluing some sorts of intelligence in some regions and so on and so forth so I'm thinking - yeah, there kind of are a lot of taboos around this subject!
Ask yourself this - is there anyone you have ever met that would be willing to let their kids be a little bit dumber if that meant they would have the genes to be a little bit better at being a quarterback? Because I have met a lot of those people.
There is a question of how Intelligence is measured and what the tests optimize, but certainly no prospective parent would want dumber children when speaking of intelligence in general. The parent post seemed hold that even this position is amoral.
You raise a good point of potential tradeoffs, and intelligence is not the only factor to optimize for. I imagine most parents would optimize for health and happiness above it.
That said, it is unclear to what degree tradeoffs are required. For example, smart quarterbacks certainly exist. To me, this is an argument for further research into the genetic basis of health, happiness, and intelligence.
I find it interesting that the subject sparks such visceral reactions in people, and how these reactions differ across countries and cultures. I think the subject of Steve HSU is a great an example of this which will be interesting to watch play out.[1] US critics were very quick to assume his research had racial motivations, while in China the subject research receives a $1.5B grant.
>The parent post seemed hold that even this position is amoral.
I supposed because our ways of measuring intelligence are faulty, if someone tells you they will gene optimize your kids for high intelligence they must be using some measurement for what that is.
on edit: as I believe most human qualities have at least some environmental component it could well be that you have a gene that increases the chance of getting a quarterback, decreases the chance of intelligence and still end up with
1. a dumb quarterback
2. a smart quarterback
3. an dumb non-quarterback
4. a smart non-quarterback
only with different percentile chances going in to the process. Although if someone is a parent increasing chances for a dumb quarterback I am betting smart result is unlikely (unless the kid hates parental authority and becomes smart to spite them, which is basically what I did)
Thanks for continuing to engage, but I'm not sure we are seeing eye to eye on the fundamental question.
Putting aside the challenges of defining and measuring general intelligence, is it amoral to desire or take action to bring about a smarter child?
It seems that some people hold that yes, it is, because this ranks and devalues dumb people.
What do you think about this?
I think that it is perfectly reasonable, and in fact standard practice. Parents Intentionally optimize for smart children over dumb ones all the time using non-genetic means.
If you agree here, do you think using genetics to increase intelligence is conceptually amoral for other reasons? Alternatively, is your point that the technology isn’t mature enough to be ethical. Or is it that it IS ethical, just not practical?
For what it is worth, at least one commercial service is already available in the USA to screen embryos for non-disease genes which are probabilisticlly linked to lower IQ, by whatever metric the companies use to measure and define IQ. I think they started testing embryos in 2018.
>Putting aside the challenges of defining and measuring general intelligence, is it amoral to desire or take action to bring about a smarter child?
Putting it aside - no. Having it in the equation, I don't necessarily think so but I can see how someone might because , as said, the way to define intelligence is not sure and someone is making the decision as to how it is being defined.
>For what it is worth, at least one commercial service is already available in the USA to screen embryos for non-disease genes which are probabilisticlly linked to lower IQ, by whatever metric the companies use to measure and define IQ
So, it might be bad this because obviously the parents are unlikely to have the resources to determine what measure to use, they just have to assume the company's measure is a good one. Just like the police have no way of determining if the face recognition algorithm in their new machine learning toolkit is a good one so they trust the company that tells them it will help catch criminals.
>s your point that the technology isn’t mature enough to be ethical. Or is it that it IS ethical, just not practical?
I think that it might have unethical results as a side effect - a la the machine learning facial recognition example, or less likely even unethical motivations (because who knows if a company doing this stuff can also have ulterior motives)
But returning to >is it amoral to desire or take action to bring about a smarter child?
As a general principle no - but no general principle ever exists, the principle needs an actual implementation. Many of the processes that have been done by parents over generations to attempt to bring about smarter children can be pointed to and decried, even considered immoral.
>Parents Intentionally optimize for smart children over dumb ones all the time using non-genetic means
Sure, and lots of the things that are done people point at and say that is awful! I'm not saying that maximizing genes for intelligence IS awful, only it might be, especially given we don't really know or agree overall what it is we're measuring.
It seems like we have a pretty similar assessment.
I was aware of the challenges around definition and implementation, but you raise a really good points about trust and transparency that I had not considered.
While parents can reasonably see and understand the cognitive impacts that health, nutrition, and environmental enrichment have on their kids, this is not the case for genetic modifications, and this could be a meaningful distinction.
I'm pale. I think it's neat that paleness exist in the world. Would I run of the risk of people not liking some phenotypic trait that I identify with like paleness and choose to remove it, in order to greatly reduce the amount of anxiety, depression, cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, schizophrenia, parkinsons, and alzheimers in the world?
> Epstein's intrest in eugenics is pretty well documented.
i don't think of myself as much of an epstein apologist, but as far as i can tell this traces back to him talking about wanting to have a bunch of children, which seems like a bit of a stretch to me
I think the comment your referring to was a little less innocent than him wanting to just have a few kids. I did a fair bit of reading on this guy a while back and I seem to recall there being quite a bit of public documents and testimony that pointed out Epsteins weird interest in eugenetics.
Epstein's intrest in eugenics is pretty well documented. I don't think it's a stretch to think his special interest in funding an evolution research team at Harvard was directly related to his abhorrent views. Sure his funding probably has had some higher order positive effects but it seems incredibly silly to suggest that such a monsterous person was donating all this money becuase of his passion for science. His constant oversight suggests that he probably had an agenda and use in mind for the research and I find it incredibly hard to believe it was anything good/humanitarian. You also have to keep in mind this is not just a guy with bad views, this is a person who has wielded money and power to directly cause evil for a very long time.