private_messaging comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong
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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.