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ChrisHallquist comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong
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Most of the problems described in this post seem to be things that are not really practical to do anything about, but this caught my eye:
Really we need to stop using the word "eugenics." In the real world it really isn't smart to keep insisting on the "official" definition of a word decades after it acquired negative connotations for actually pretty good reasons.
My desire to hang onto familiar words reminds me of a joke.
"I'm a great communicator, people just keep misunderstanding me."
yeah I had this exact problem happen over twitter. "I like eugenics" "You're a monster!" "What? It's not like I advocate genocide to achieve it!" "Eugenics means advocating genocide!"
Eugenics may well be slow genocide. I have no faith that it would be equitably distributed.
Ok, the problem here is that the thread got derailed disputing the definition of genocide when the relevant question is "should we do X".
If it doesn't involve killing, it can't be genocide.
The targets may not be convinced by this argument.
It's probable that we need a range of words to cover different sorts of efforts at eliminating ethnicities and genetic sub-groups.
From p. 119 of William H. Tucker's The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology:
Ethnic cleansing seems appropriate.
edit: That is, the term seems appropriate.
"Ethnic cleansing" usually implies causing people to leave an area.
Well, it's a move in the direction away from the murderous connotations held by genocide. And taken literally it is pretty descriptive of the goals of eugenics.
Arguably, we already do - genocide for the first one, and eugenics for the second one.
The problem is that "eugenics" doesn't distinguish between positive and negative eugenics, nor does it imply anything about consent. The latter is serous, not just because consent matters, but because there's been a history of involuntary and frequently covert sterilization of low status women.
I've heard the high level of incarceration of black men in the US called genocide because it takes those men out of the mating pool. It seems like overblown language to me, but the premise doesn't seem totally implausible.
Personally, I tend to not use the term "eugenics" unless someone asks me if I support it, in which case I tell them that I only support it when it's voluntary. This usually works well.
Relatedly, it's interesting to note that some people object to eugenics even when it's clear from context that there is consent, such as when some pro-choice people oppose abortion of fetuses with Downs or other defects.
Not true according to many standard definitions of genocide. You should especially read carefully Raphael Lemkin's original definition.
So, aliens come down and sterilize every single dutch-speaking person on earth (also, Flemish and Afrikaans), as well as anybody who has a dutch-speaking immediate relative - genocide, or not?
It depends on what you're trying to get at with the word "genocide". It's targeted elimination of a group, but not by mass murder. Does that qualify as a genocide? That's like asking if a tree makes a sound if it falls in a forest and no one hears it.
The problem isn't the word. If you describe a policy that meets the official definition, but don't use the word people still hate the thing you're talking about and know it is called eugenics.
People actually call things that are less controversial than actual eugenics, "eugenics". E.g. Project Prevention.
The word isn't the whole problem, but this a case where not using the word would be painless and beneficial.
"Eugenics" is a problematic word because it's now associated with involuntary sterilization and Nazis. But for some reason, some supporters of voluntary human enhancement will go and use the term for things they support.
They can't control whether other people use "eugenics" to attack all kinds of things they don't like, but the least the former group could do is avoid actively aiding the latter group.
Given that there is a popular tendency for people to accuse even totally different things of being "eugenics" to discredit them, if you tried to rebrand eugenics as something else people would notice very quickly, they would "accuse" you of being eugenicist, and the debate about whether Plan Y is or is not a good idea would immediately shift to a debate about whether Plan Y is or is not eugenics - which you would lose, because it is.
This reminds me of an interesting analysis I heard about why Heartiste manages to hang on when many people who are much less horrible than he is get laughed off the Internet. If you write some very reasonable liberal enlightened essay about how maybe there's some reason to believe some women are such-and-such but we must not jump to conclusions, people will call you a sexist, you'll have to argue that you're not a sexist, and your opponents have spent their entire lives accusing people of sexism and are better at this argument than you are and will win (or at least reduce your entire output to defending yourself). If you're Heartiste, and people call you sexist, you can just raise an eyebrow, say "Well, yeah", and watch people whose only master-level argumentative gambit is accusing people of sexism have no idea what to do
Heartiste happens to be awful, but I'm pretty sure the same strategy could be applied to reasonable positions. If I wanted to start a site that promoted sexist positions, I would call it www.sexism.com.
If the human biodiversity people had called their movement neo-racism, they would have avoided having every mention of them devolve into painful non-debates like this one. Compare the neo-reactionaries, who are much more politically astute and who were entirely correct to call their movement neo-reaction.
It's about consequences of what you say.
If you say you like eugenics, the promotional consequences of your words are not limited to some nice, non coercive, purely voluntary eugenics. Instead, it is more or less spread over eugenics as frequently understood.
If you want to promote the voluntary measures, you say that you are pro choice, pro birth control, and believe that parents should have the right to improve health of their future children. If you want to also promote the involuntary variety, that's when you would say "I like eugenics".
AFAIK very few people use the improvement of the genes of the next generation as an argument in favour of pro-choice or pro-birth control positions -- such an argument would be automatically frowned upon by mainstream political circles, exactly because it's seen as "eugenics" (and hence racism) even without any coercion.
And "improve health of their future children" has the connotations of just avoiding disease or disability, rather than e.g. also increase the potential for high cognitive skills.
All in all I think I think that something like "I'd support strictly voluntary eugenics" would be much clearer in intent than what you suggest -- shorter too.
You can already choose to have or not to have children, or choose the mate, based on what ever motivation pleases you, including the notion of improving the human race. It's sort of like saying "I support strictly voluntary segregation". Whites and blacks already have enough freedom of movement to segregate themselves all they want.
Not really, since you have no way of keeping members of the other race from settling in your new neighborhood.
Well, you can adopt an ideology that members of the other race find more or less universally detestable and put up posters for it all across the neighborhood, but this has the consequence of filling your neighborhood with an ideology that lots and lots of people find detestable.
This assumes words have true, immutable meanings, which they don't.
For example, if you respond to the claim that Obama is a communist by...
Wait a second, you yourself explained this pretty well in your Anti-Reactionary FAQ: "The meaning of words changes over time, and the Cold War made the more moderate elements of communism drop the 'communist' label."
Accusations of "eugenics" generally deserve a similar response: meanings of words change over time, and the fact that a policy fits Galton's original definition of "eugenics" doesn't mean it's "really" eugenics any more than we should examine pre-Cold War communist documents to establish whether America is "really" a communist country.
Yes, arguing about definitions is annoying, but there's really no way around having to explain that no, policy Y is not what people commonly associate with "eugenics." The real choice you have is whether to alienate a portion of your audience from the outset by declaring you like eugenics.
And yes, ballsy countersignalling can sometimes work, but this doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea in every case. For example, I predict that politician who described her support for legal abortion by saying "I support murder in some cases" (*cough cough*) would have a very difficult time getting elected.
I don't think it assumes words have immutable meanings, just that they have some conventional meaning. You are proposing that we turn the debate from "Is eugenics plan x a good idea?" to "Does plan x, which fits the current conventional meaning of eugenics, sound like eugenics to you?" Unless you can unilaterally change the conventional meaning of eugenics, then for your purposes the meaning might as well be immutable - your argument will fail. And not only do people show no signs of being willing to shift the conventional meaning of eugenics in a pro-eugenics direction, but they seem very willing to shift the conventional meaning of eugenics in an anti-eugenics direction whenever anyone asks.
I think probably things inside and outside the Overton Window require different strategies. "Ballsy countersignaling" might work differently for things outside the window than for things inside of it. I agree that the politician shouldn't call abortion murder.
Is the association unwarranted? Even when eugenics was very much "a thing" in many Western countries (including, AIUI, the Progressive-era U.S) it always denoted coercive intervention to suppress fertility in the unpopular outgroups du jour.
And apparently, Yvain's use of this term is what ticked off this person in the first place. We should just stop using it.
It's certainly not smart in public, when you're trying to get things done; but if you're trying to maintain quality, wouldn't it be a net positive to drive off people prone to The Worst Argument In The World?
You know the problem with not outright saying that what you are advocating is actually eugenics is that eventually someone else will do it for you.
Hopefully if their use of the world differs from expectations casual observers won't catch up, I mean...
Wouldn't raise many eyebrows, but if you heard...
...then I can't help the feeling that e-word may crop up a lot. I would probably be inclined to use it myself, for all honesty.
What word would You suggest instead of eugenics ?
(Btw, I find it hilarious, having the discussion about inventing newspeak at LW, of all forums !)
Affirmative Genetic Action; Fighting Against Genetic Unequality; Genetic Justice; No Mutant Child Left Behind...
I'd like to borrow from David Brin and call it "Uplift".
The mainstream media seems less terrified of the idea of "designer babies", which is not specifically eugenics, but related enough that I wonder if Eugenics shouldn't quietly respawn in the Designer Babies category?
Too narrow.
(It's funny how the instance of ‘eugenics’ after which that happened was actually dysgenic BTW.)
Even better (or worse) than that. It was dysgenic for the German population. It was probably eugenic for the Jewish population. So what the Nazis managed to do was to help make the Jews racially superior to the Germans.
In other words, they managed to massacre 6 million people in order to achieve the exact reverse of what they said they wanted to do.
For the avoidance of doubt: (1) I think what they did was a horrible terrible thing, (2) although it was probably eugenic for the Jewish population it was dyseverythingelse for them, and in particular (3) I am certainly not suggesting, e.g., that Jewish people should be glad it happened or anything similarly monstrous. Also (4) of course neither "the Jews" nor "the Germans" is a particularly well-defined group biologically and I am not suggesting otherwise, and (5) I am not claiming that this sort of "racial superiority" is something anyone should be aiming at. Oh, and (6) I am also not suggesting that the worst thing about what they did is that it didn't achieve their goals. It would have been just as awful if it had.
I'm not sure my premises are correct, but this might be an example of LW's excessive emphasis on genes. I think you're saying that smarter Jews were more likely to survive the Holocaust. This might be true for German Jews (a lot of warning, a lot of people with resources to move-- and still, only 25% got out), but not so true about Polish Jews, where it happened very fast-- and that's where a very high proportion of the Holocaust happened.
Also, a major focus at LW is on extraordinarily smart people. Even if Ashkenazi Jews went from an average IQ of 115 to 117, where are the great mathematicians and physicists? I tentatively suggest that there was something special about Jewish culture (or possibly Jewish culture + surrounding Gentile culture when the latter was benign) in Germany, Austria, and possibly Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and it's gone.
When looking at the question of whether something intended as a eugenic program was in fact eugenic or dysgenic, an emphasis on genes seems highly appropriate, no? (I agree that the eugenic or dysgenic effect isn't the only or the most important thing we should care about -- the six million people murdered would seem like one other thing, for instance -- and I already said that as clearly as I could.)
Yes, I'm suggesting that probably smarter Jews were more likely to get out early and more likely to find ways to survive. (Of course plenty of smart ones died and plenty of not-so-smart ones lived too.) If so, then the Holocaust will have had a (probably rather small) eugenic effect on the Jewish population.
26% of all Nobel prizewinning physicists to date, and 29% of all Fields medallists to date, are at least half-Jewish by ancestry, according to jinfo.org. I haven't checked their figures.
I agree this is likely the case, but I think those where likely doomed at the end of WW1 not WW2, as I credit the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires as their incubators. We are unlikely to see the Kaisers return. It is most unfortunate because the intellectual beacon that was Vienna and groups like the Martians won't ever be seen again.
Can you expand on what was special about the culture? I just had the cultural explanation as a hypothesis, but I don't have details.
I don't know much about the Holocaust, however, due to the shape of a Bell Curve, very small changes in the average result in large changes at the tail ends.
I think that depends on the cause of the change.
Other than lack of homogeneity, why would this not be true?
I'm not sure I understand your question, but eliminating the left tail of a bell curve would change the average but not necessarily extend the right tail.
What exactly happens depends on the model, but I think it would be very difficult to build a model with nonzero heritability that produced a bell curve and where truncating the left tail did not affect the right tail.
Usually bell curves occur from the sum of many small discrete variables. That appears to be true for IQ. Under this model, any form of selection has basically the same effect, at least in the long term. If the old equilibrium had random mating and the next generation is also produced by random mating, then a new bell curve will be produced in the very next generation. If the old distribution were due to assortative mating, and that continues, it will take longer to reach equilibrium. But it will affect the right tail eventually.
Added: no, more than a generation to equilibrium.
Well, since IQ is forced to be a bell curve by definition, the fact that it is a bell curve doesn't count as evidence for anything.
Here's a short-term analysis that may be more convincing.
I assume perfect heritability and pm's choice of 50% selection, both to make the effects larger. I assume additive genetics because that's what we expect from the assumption of a bell curve. The far right tail is largely produced from two parents both on the right half, even on the tail. The farther right you go, the more true this is. Assuming mating is at random. For each person who could have a right tail child, if only they found the right mate, eliminating half of the population that wouldn't do doubles their odds of having an appropriate mate and thus a right tail child. Thus, the right tail is twice as big. The further out we go, the closer it is to twice as big. If everyone has twice as many children to make up for the population being cut in half, then the tail is four times as big.
If there is strong assortative mating, the people on the right tail weren't going to going to have children with the left half and the first effect doesn't apply, since the selection only eliminates pairings that weren't going to happen. Indeed, assortative mating is very similar to truncation selection, so combining the two is redundant in the first generation.
In the first generation, the left tail does not look at all gaussian. In the long term, it does become gaussian. In the short term right becomes a thicker tail, but in the long term the variance has gone down and the right tail becomes smaller, starting at two standard deviations from the original mean.
If you did that then after one or two generations, regression to the mean would set the average IQ right back to where it was (almost). If you eliminated enough of the left tail over several generations to actually change the average to a stable higher value, then the right tail would be extended.
Like I said I'm not commenting on the effect of the Holocaust because I don't know anything about it.
If UberHitler kills everyone with IQ<100, that raises the average IQ without increasing the number of people with high IQ. After a few generations, you are back to a Gaussian with a smaller variance (you lost some genetic diversity) and a slightly larger mean, which means that at some IQ level that is sufficiently high you have fewer people with that IQ .