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knb comments on Shortness is now a treatable condition - Less Wrong
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Push to get rid of their low status traits usually comes from low status people, or parents who don't want their children to stay low status (or people who sell them the treatment).
People already use some highly harmful substances to make their skin paler. Paler skin requires doesn't give even a tiny fraction of benefits of being really "white", and side effects are far greater than what I proposed. By extrapolation if there was a magic pill you could take to make yourself permanently Caucasian without any significant side effects, plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.
Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly. Of course we are unlikely to see this being tested, as such procedure seems unlikely to occur.
Here's data on how being "White" as opposed to "Black" drastically increases your mate selection opportunities. There's earnings gap, lifespan gap, larger chance of being a crime victim when you're "Black". It's naive to think that people would stay "Black" voluntarily if it was a matter of choice.
Using cosmetics to lighten skin is NOT the same as trying to "heal blackness". White people often darken their skin with chemicals (sunless tanning). This is NOT because they don't want to be white, or because they are trying to "heal whiteness". This is just a cosmetic change. In the United States at least, blackness is a boolean data type. You either are black or not. Being 25% black=Black all the way. Lightening skin is not about decreasing blackness.
Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don't cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white. Black people who are considered even slightly
I'm glad you're mentioning it, I didn't as I thought it was far too clear the opposite way.
So, in spite of very high cost (estimated $45k-$105k) of cochlear implants, very low quality of sound (described by some as human language sounding like "a croaking dalek with laryngitis"), requirement of surgery with possibility of complications, unpredictability of results, very short battery life (1-3 days), requirement of bulky external equipment (this problem is getting gradually solved) etc., popularity of cochlear implants exploded from 49k users worldwide in 2002 to 150k users in 2008.
I'd be willing to bet any money in prediction markets at imminent death of the "deaf culture" in a few generations (or for practical reasons some proxy like popularity of cochlear implants, percentage of deaf children in developing country learning sign languages etc.)
Some people from the "deaf culture" are protesting because they built their identity on this back when it was not treatable (so "not an illness"). Now as it's treatable it's considered an illness by the society, most importantly by parents of deaf children, and people who recently lost hearing. That's exactly the shift I predicted.
Really?
Then again...
Not to spam it everywhere, but here's an exchange that summarizes the parallels between the two cases.