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mattnewport comments on Savulescu: "Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction" - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure quite what you're advocating here but 'dealing with the 10% of sticklers in a firm but fair way' has very ominous overtones to me.
Those people don't get jobs or university education that they would need to use the dangerous knowledge about how to manufacture artificial viruses because they aren't smart enough in competition to the rest.
Well, presumably Roko means we would be restricting the freedom of the irrational sticklers - possibly very efficiently due to our superior intelligence - rather than overriding their will entirely (or rather, making informed guesses as to what is in their ultimate interests, and then acting on that).
My feeling is that if you rendered politicians incapable of lying it would be hard to distinguish from rendering them incapable of speaking.
If to become a politician you had to undergo some kind of process to enhance intelligence or honesty I wouldn't necessarily object. Becoming a politician is a voluntary choice however and so that's a very different proposition from forcing some kind of treatment on every member of society.
I think I'd feel bad about the resulting fallout in the politicians' home lives.
Simply using a lie detector for politicians might be a much better idea. It's also much easier. Of course a lie detector doesn't really detect whether someone would be lying but the same goes for any cognitive enhancement.
Out of curiosity, what do you have in mind here as "participate in society"?
That is, if someone wants to reject this hypothetical, make-you-smarter-and-nicer cognitive modification, what kind of consequences might they face, and what would they miss out on?
The ethical issues of simply forcing people to accept it are obvious, but most of the alternatives that occur to me don't actually seem that much better. Hence your point about "the people who do get made smarter can figure it out", I guess.