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AdeleneDawner comments on Shortness is now a treatable condition - Less Wrong
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Functionally? As far as I can tell, it's when the majority of people (or, people with power over the people in question) decide they prefer people without that trait.
But when it comes to traits that determine social status, people benefit from keeping lower status people - lower status. For instance, I wouldn't want anyone shorter than me - that I don't care about - becoming any taller; that puts me at a disadvantage.
I think a better way to determine a treatable defect: When the majority of people feel sorry for you because of the traits you have and therefore feel compelled to treat those traits. [I believe you're saying the same thing, but I added the sympathy part]. This raises the issue of what traits should reach this threshold of sympathy. As we know, a human emotion is not the best marker for doing the utilitarian thing to do. There must be a different, more objective metric that determines what a defect is.
That would be true if shorter people were a large subcommunity, or if short stature was correlated with other status-relevant traits. But when only the shortest 1-2% people are treated, and their new height isn't above average, most people's status shouldn't be negatively affected enough to notice.
The people whose status would be affected are those who are significantly short, but not short enough to qualify for treatment (funded by society). This might depend on the exact shape of the height distribution curve...
Right. It could be that increasing the height of the bottom 1-2% by a notable difference will get them to be as tall as, say, 5% of men i.e. negatively affecting 5% of men, in exchange for helping 1-2%. It's not clear whether the trade-off will be worth it.
Er... the lowest 1-2% is a subset of the lowest 5%. So they'd actually be helping 1-2% at the expense of 3-4%.
You're also assuming that height is judged on a percentile basis - that being one of the shortest 1% is bad regardless of how different that is from the average height - and I'm not at all sure that's accurate. It seems much more likely to me that height is judged relative to the judger's height, so a 6" difference is a 6" difference (with variations between how different people react to a 6" difference, of course) regardless of whether there are many, few, or no shorter people in the population. This is purely theoretical (I'm not sure it stands up to being thought of in terms of how people are socialized to react to each other), but my point is really that there are several ways the height difference issue could actually work.
I said "5% of men" not "the bottom 5% of men."