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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
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Hm. Maybe we are really socially isolated then, but as a couple we were never really interested in what will other people think if we do something (we both are the not having many friends type), and we would have jumped on the option of having an easy baby, no learning difficulties, not crying during the night, and of course perfectly healthy. Granted, we would not edit things like hair or eye color because it would feel like an unwelcome intrusion into other person's individuality even when the person does not exist yet. But we would edit out the potential problems.
I remember how we were full of fears of getting a Downs case or worse. Plain simply we were not 100% sure of our ability to give a fully healthy child the time investment she needs, we would not have been able to deal with a disabled one who needs much more. Thankfully we have a healthy baby although developing smaller than usual, but the fear was there and we would have gladly accepted the option to not have this fear. I don't understand why would be a social stigma against e.g. fixing Downs. Of course things like customizing hair color is a bit too frivolous to me too, but that is a different story. I would also not give things like a musical talent because we cannot know if it does not lead to problems down the road like having a calling to something else, yet choosing to work in the talent as that is a safer career.
You seem to have a very bizarre idea of what constitutes someone's "individuality" since you appear to be more concerned about superficial things like eye and hair color as opposed to things like personality and learning style.
Precisely - individuality is in things that don't matter. Learning style is something we should simply be efficient at. Parallel: it would be good if we all ate the One Perfect Nutritious Diet but customize it with sauces and spices: being individual in the things that don't matter. More realistic: we all ideally dress according to the weather as not being cold or hot matters, but choose colors of clothes that express our individuality because color does not matter. What is bizarre about it?
That's not what I mean by "individuality" and not I suspect not what most people mean by it either. How about you explain why your definition of "individuality" is something anyone should care about.
Also, would you really not mind if I forcibly overrode your memories and personality as long as your hair and eye color stayed the same?
At this point I should admit I have not really invested an immense amount of time into figuring this out, but still may be useful: when we value something merely because it is different or because it was freely chosen, it suggests it is not much better than other things or else we would like it for its actualy betterness. So people may customize their body or car to look a bit different than most others so that they can show they are different individuals (cue Life of Brian here) or that they choose some things autonomously instead of accepting the default choice, but all these things are not so important.
However when something is important we usually want it the best, we don't want 100 different ways of manufacturing nails just that every factory can play special snowflake, we want one most efficient way and every factory adopting it. When things matter, and some things are better than others, then reasonable people don't play special snowflakery and don't go for an individual, custom solution just to show off their non-conformism.
So I have a generic vision of reasonable people wanting to do things the best way, uniformly, but when something does not matter much or one way is not so much better than the others then they relax the unformity and it is okay to play special snowflakery and customize everything and express our oh so awesome nonconformism in them.
I think this must make sense, I am just not so sure anymore that it is really relevant to the question. As I have to admit things like memories do not fall either of these buckets. As for overriding my personality, well, if highly inefficient ways of dealing with some problems are considered part of one's personality (i.e. habits) why do you think I am even here on LW? That is pretty much the whole point. This whole website is all about trying to get as close to the self-rewriting AI as our biological hardware allows.
Assuming we know in advance what that is, and that it won't change as circumstances change. The point of individuality is that in general the only way to find out the efficiency of a method is by trying it. Hence if a factory owner has a new crazy idea for how to manufacture nails, let him try it (without having to convince a panel in "nail manufacturing experts" first).
"Special snowflakeness" is want happens when "individuality" becomes a lost purpose. The "individuality only in irrelevant things" that you are arguing for is what happens when it becomes a really lost purpose.
If there a social consensus against designer babies they get outlawed.
Regardless of the law, would it be far-fetched to say that a certain percent of the population would be enhanced anyway?
In the beginning stages It's quite easy to write laws that make it a disadvantage to be genetically modified. Bruce Sterlings novel Distraction deals with the protagonist having a "personal background problem" because he's genetically modified in a world where that's outlawed. As a result he can't run for office and just do PR for a politician.
It's easy to write the laws, but it may be hard to enforce them.
It isn't easy to identify people who are just modified to be in the upper end of normal human capacities.
People normally have parents. It's easy to say when the genes of the parents don't correspond to the genes of a child.
Apart from that I think you underrate the ease of doing genetic engineering without leaving traces. Especially with a decade between the moment of birth and the moment that someone analyses the DNA for traces of manipulation.
Is there anything that would prevent that number from increasing?
Do people have really low amounts of libertarian-ish instincts to have at least some gray zone of "disliked but not outlawed" ? I guess cigarettes are in this zone.
Gradually in the process of moving into the "outlawed" zone.
Would you count "legal but with Pigouvian taxes on it" count as "libertarian-ish"?
Yes. At least a choice is offered. Current EU level taxes, although fairly insane (€3-€7 a pack on the average and without the taxes it would be under 50 cents), are still low enough to compete with the black market, the black market did not get very big yet. So this is more or less inside normalcy.
When a choice is not offered, such as the categorical ban of smoking at bars in most EU countries, the typical choices are to either to engage in something illegal and black-marketish, or to obey, and to obey has two versions, either to go there for a drink and not smoke, or to not go at all.
The difference between the two that the outcomes of the first are fairly calculable, predictable, and easily amendable. You can notch up a Pigovian tax until you notice the black market is too big of an annoyance, then turn it down a notch or two. The second option leads to unpredictable chaos, anything from bars closing down to public parks becoming impromptu drinking and smoking avenues.
So for the sake of a predictable order, it would be safer if bans would be replaced with special taxes that allow more granularity, such as allowing smoking in a bar that pays hazard pay and extra health insurance to the waitstaff. The market can price that in. While the non-smokers can enjoy lower prices in the smoke-free establishments who can compete better this way. Again the goal would be to fine-tune it until you reach a balance where both types of establishments flourish.
Now I realize there is something weird calling a plan that involves the governmental micromanagement of market libertarian-ish, but the point is it is still more so, still more market oriented, than categorical bans.
If you have a minimum wage, that might not work. What if the free market price of bar staff is $X per hour, the free market price of bar staff under poor health conditions is $Y but the minimum wage is greater than X and Y?
Also the legal use being restricted from more and more spaces.
Of course, the fully libertarian thing would be allowing the owner of each bar to decide whether or not to forbid patrons from smoking; allowing them would drive certain perspective patrons away and forbidding them would drive other perspective patrons away, and it is in the interest of each bar owner to figure out which ones outnumber the others.
I find that less Pigouvian and less libertarian-ish. Bit of an analysis here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/m6b/thoughts_on_minimizing_designer_baby_drama/cdfp
It is odd - I received this message in my inbox.
In the parent of that comment, is the little envelope green? If so, it means that accidentally or deliberately, you asked to be notified of replies to that comment.
Thank you. I mostly come here from my smartphone, and sometimes miss the correct buttons. Sorry for the trouble.
Don't focus on the abstract but on actual issue.
Given that I can't even legally grow genetically engineered plants on my balcony in most of Europe. growing genetically engineered humans is likely not something we will allow.
That's why genetically engineered Chinese will soon buy Europe and turn it into a theme park. With authentically unenhanced natives, no less.
"Designer babies" is an ambiguous term. You're talking about fixing defects, while the original post is more about enhancements.
There is no clear zero bound.
Define a "defect" as something where
-- an overwhelming majority of most people agree on how to determine who has it (which may include deferring to doctors, as long as they don't defer to different sets of doctors)
-- most people do not have it
-- an overwhelming majority of most people without it think it's a bad idea to personally have, and a good idea to eliminate from society
Fixing those should not lead to the problems that making enhancements does.
Go back a couple of hundred years. Define the defect as "lack of belief in Jesus Christ". It qualifies under your criteria.
No, it doesn't. That's utterly absurd; are you seriously suggesting that there was ever a time when an overwhelming majority of all people was Christian? You do realize that just because your history book includes mostly Christians doesn't mean there aren't non-European places with non-Christian inhabitants, right?
At any rate, I don't claim and don't believe that this would work for times in the past.
I understand "most people" locally -- that's most of those people who form your society and who influence your culture and political decisions. Were you thinking of some sort of global referendums and, by implication, a global government?
Our present will be the past in the immediate future :-P
If you don't trust the "past" people to change your gene pool, what makes you think "future" people will trust you to change their gene pool?
Do you consider lack of vitamin C production a possible problem that you would want to fix?
Dunno. It seems it became a non-problem, cheap pills, and even them almost unnecessary with a decent fresh diet. My gut instinct would be to fix only those problems that don't have such easy convenient external solutions. For example I would not want to be able to run 30 km/h for two hours so that I can save the cost of bicycle. I don't have very rational arguments for it, just the basic instict to conserve as much about our humanity as we know it as we can unless the cost is too high. Getting vitamin pills / eating fresh food or buying a bike is not a too high cost. Perhaps it can be justified on the basis of not trading something that works without side effects for something that may have them.
Our ancestors did produce their own vitamin C. But there are a bunch of deletions in our copy of the gene so it doesn't work anymore. Fixing it up wouldn't mean to move that far away from what it means to be humans.
Also if we decide that we don't need the gene, why not get rid of it completely? Why carry around a broken vitamin C gene? It seems stupid from a design perspective.
Vitamin C is just one example that's nice, because it's an ability that we lost in evolution but there are many small issues. For a lot of enzymes different species have an enzyme that serves the same function. Some of them however have better enzymes that work more efficiently. Yeast has had a lot more evolutionary cycles then us and might be simply better at a lot of housekeeping genes. For every gene we could search for the best one that's out there and exchange the human version with it.
Of course we will first do it on pigs that we want to eat. But if the pigs are much better when you gave them the best version of every housekeeping gene that's out there, some humans will also want to have the best ones.
Then it sounds like you don't really want designer babies.
There's no 30 km/h running gene that you could possibly put somewhere. To get that outcome you would need to modify a bunch of genes and as a result have more fit people.
This would be an extraordinarily bad idea especially from yeast in particular. 'Best' is contextual.
It's contextual but that doesn't mean that "best" doesn't exist.
At the beginning it's unlikely to be tried on humans, but when it comes to farm animals I would expect that people do experiment with it. Maybe a pig with yeast mitrochondria does better than a regular pig because the yeast mitrochondria had more time to be highly optimized by evolution. It might be that you need to do a few additional changes to have the pig deal with the yeast mitochondria, but people will experiment.
If you get an enzyme that's twice as efficient in catalyzing some reaction, you have to down regulate it's expression.
One problem with this perspective is that not everyone is agreed on what is a "potential problem" and what falls into "[an]other person's individuality". Deafness springs to mind as an example, and in the other direction, what if ginger hair would increase the odds that your child got bullied?
Bullying is AFAIK based on perceived weakness, being a good victim candidate. Granted, being "weird" and thus seen as not having many allies, easy to single out, is a perceived weakness. Still I would probably tackle the problem by other means (like convincing ginger kids to always protect each other). Deafness is clearly a defect, I don't really care about the deaf hamstering about how it is a culture. It is a culture made to deal with a defect, and as such it is a very respectable one, but it is just like the culture of grieving, if we become immortal we will not miss spectacular tombstones.
But sure on the meta level I do agree not all people will agree with me here. But there is an obvious solution of leaving the corner cases to the parents jurisdiction.
What I would want to avoid is arms races really. Such as in height (being important for the sex appeal of men).