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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
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Ideally we can convince thoughtful people involved in this field to suggest a set of regulatory guidelines.
Take a look at real-life political processes.
Especially processes in countries like China that are likely more open to experimentation.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/27/highlights-from-my-notes-from-another-psychiatry-conference/
There are lots of people who view scientists favorably. Global warming would be a prominent case of scientists saying "we need to do X" and a large social movement forming around their advice. It used to be illegal to teach evolution in some states; now it's illegal to teach creationism. You probably think the pro-science side is weak because you (like me) are a member of the pro-science superorganism, and one of the things superorganisms do in order to fire their members up is paint themselves as underdogs who are struggling against overwhelming forces of evil. If we were religious we'd probably be complaining about the War on Christmas or something.
Do you want to be specific about what failure modes you forsee? It's frustrating to see generic cynicism rather than concrete failure modes. Generic cynicism is just demoralizing. Concrete failure modes can be debugged.
I don't think the "sides" here will have a "pro-science" and "anti-science" labels. The dispute is going to be, as usual, about power, money, and values.
Sure. CASSANDRA MODE! X-)
I foresee first a blank prohibition based on the "we have a nice business going on here, this shit sound scary and, worse, capable of inducing serious socio-political changes -- let's just forbid it all". Then I foresee a gray market developing for the children of the rich and famous and the regulators turning a blind eye to it. Then I foresee the gray market becoming so widespread it will become impossible to ignore it any more, so the regulators will come up with regulations to safeguard public safety and morality. These will initially take the negative form as bans on certain types of modifications. Eventually they will add mandatory modifications ("This is just like vaccines! Are you anti-science?! Don't you want the best for your children?") which is where things will start to get really iffy. If the society manages to get through this without the wheels flying off (I'm not holding my breath) we'll probably get to the "everything not forbidden is mandatory" stage.
Is that specific enough?
I think it's pretty likely that things will play out the way you describe. I'm wondering how it's possible to improve on that, if at all.
Of course the "pro-science" side looks like it's winning. One aspect of winning is the ability to have yourself declared "pro-science" and even have government agencies re-write past data to support your argument.
To get a more objective view, let's look at past government interventions, for example, the history of government nutrition policy is full of the "pro-science" side winning with bad science and imposing it on the public.
Searching for other takes on that link shows that that rewriting of historical temperatures was announced in advance, is routinely done, and didn't actually affect how much evidence there was for global warming in general, even if it seemed to do so in a cherry-picked case.
Well that lowers how much credit I assign atmospheric science even more.
A skeptical take on that link