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Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong
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Luther Sloan to Juilian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Inquisition”, written by Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller
Presuming that Starfleet Medical has limited enrollment, and that if he hadn't lied, a superior candidate would have enrolled, then that superior candidate would have saved those hundreds or thousands, and then a few more.
He was lying about having had gene therapy. He was a superior candidate by virtue of same but it would have kept him out because Starfleet is anti-gene-therapy-ist. (At least I assume so - I remember the character had the therapy and had to hide it, but not whether it came out in that episode or something else did.)
That is much more justifiable than the standard case of lying on applications.
I can imagine Star Robin Hanson writing an angry blog post about what this implies about Starfleet's priorities.
Have you seen any Star Trek? Star Robin Hanson would have a lot of angry posts to write.
Some, as a child.
There was a (flimsy) historical reason - there had been wars about "augments" in the past; the anti-augments won (somehow), determined the war was about "people setting themselves above their fellow humans", and discouraged more people augmenting themselves/their children in this way by (ineffectively) making it a net negative.
Heck, anti-fascism beat fascism, it's not always the stronger-seeming ideology that comes out on top.
Anti-fascism is perhaps more usefully described as pro-something else. In the event, communism.
I read somewhere that, in Star Trek land, genetic engineering of intelligent beings is highly correlated with evil, either because it's being done for an evil purpose to begin with or because the engineered beings themselves end up as arrogant, narcissistic jerks with a strong tendency toward becoming evil. The latter implies that there's a technical problem with the genetic engineering of humans that hasn't been solved yet, which Bashir was lucky to have avoided.
It might not be a technical problem. It might merely be that most augments are raised by people who keep telling them that they're genetically superior to everyone else and therefore create in them a sense of arrogance and entitlement. Which is only made worse by the fact that they actually are stronger, healthier and smarter than everyone else (but not by as big a margin as they tend to imagine).
Robin Hanson has some interesting things to say about Battle Star Galactica.
This is correct. He lied about not being genetically engineered.
I see no good reason to presume a correlation between a med school's admissions criteria and total lives saved over a doctor's career as tight as this reasoning requires. Or to presume that it is near certain that if he hadn't lied, another liar wouldn't have been accepted in his place.
This reasoning merely requires that the correlation exist and be positive.