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Lumifer comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
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It wouldn't be called "docile", of course. It will be called "socially well-adjusted" and "free of criminal tendencies".
Who exactly in society is supposed to have an incentive to produce "docile" people? Following Epictetus, do you forsee teachers lobbying the government to mandate the production of obedient children to make their lives easier? That doesn't seem very plausible to me.
If politicians want to be in charge of a "docile" citizenry, changing the genes of newborn babies is not going to help with that, since by the time the newborns are grown up the politicians will be out of office.
Also, you haven't explained why a "docile" citizenry is a bad thing. Personally, I'm leaning towards it being a good thing, especially if enforced universally. [Edit: to clarify, I stated this because I perceived "docile" people to be more altruistic. Troublemaking altruists are just as good.] I expect the people reading Less Wrong are substantially more "docile" than members of the general public in the sense that they prefer reading over loud parties and rarely get in to fights. And Less Wrong is also 30% effective altruist, a rate much higher than the population at large.
I don't think your model of politicians is very good if you think that they only care about what happens when they are in office.
Reducing testosterone would be a way to make people less aggressive. Even if it does reduce criminality, there a price to pay.
Those who have power.
I think we are going to have a radical values-based disagreement about that.
That's not what "docile" means.
Sounds horrible to me, but you know what? I'll exacerbate your optics problem and just call the end result "genetic slaves".
OK, so let's think about this. Here are some types of powerful people:
Politicians
Movie stars
CEOs
Professional athletes
Religious leaders
Some other group?
Politicians have little incentive to produce docile designer babies as I already described. CEOs might have wanted docile workers in a previous era, but the best knowledge workers aren't especially docile. I can't think of any incentives for movie stars or professional athletes. Religious leaders might be incentivized to produce docile citizens, but for a bunch of reasons I'm not especially worried: religiosity is on the decline, religious leaders seem likely to be too horrified to participate in the discussion of what characteristics to push for, and only the most sociopathic religious leaders are likely to consciously realize that they would benefit from docility.
It sounds to me as though you are rounding to the nearest sci-fi cliche here instead of thinking things through logically. It's fine if you want to be inspired by sci-fi in your dystopic musings, but ultimately it's only persuasive if you can explain the incentive structure that would cause a particular dystopia to arise. We're trying to tell accurate stories here, not horrifying or entertaining ones.
That sounds entirely connotational with no denotation.
If you don't mind, maybe we could put aside the whole question of what's politically viable for a minute and just talk about what our ideal outcome is. Psychologists have studied the construct of agreeableness. Wikipedia lists 6 "facets":
Trust
Straightforwardness
Altruism
Compliance
Modesty
Tender-Mindedness
I suspect you and I are actually on the same page in the sense that we'd prefer to live in a society of straightforward and altruistic people than a society of manipulative and selfish ones. It's not clear to me whether living in a society of highly compliant people would be desirable or not. "Docility" has connotations of trust, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness in my estimation. Our dicussion might be simplified by tabooing this word, since it's actually a bundle of a bunch of concepts.
Heh. We do have a major mismatch :-) Your list I would call "people you're likely to see on TV". Let me offer you a few other examples.
Your neighborhood cop is powerful. He can kill you and stands a good chance of escaping the usual consequences. He can easily make your life very unpleasant and painful, if only for a while, and have zero consequences for that.
Rich people willing to use their money can be powerful -- and these are not usually the celebrities you've mentioned. Some guy who ran some unknown hedge fund for a while, invested his money into a private equity deal, sold it successfully, and is now a multimillionaire living in a nondescript mansion in Connecticut -- he's never been on TV and outside of his circle of friends no one would recognize his name -- he could be powerful if he wanted to.
Unelected bureaucrats are very powerful. Politicians in democracies come and go, but civil servants stay and build their influence and their networks. They are the professionals of governing (politicians are professionals of marketing).
Warlords are powerful. Power still comes out of a barrel of a gun and you don't need to be a politician to run a place. Mafia/cartel/gang/etc. leaders are here as well.
Social groups ("tribes") can be powerful -- or powerless. These, by the way, tend to have long-term interests.
Not a sci-fi cliche, but real human history. The ruling classes have always preferred a docile population and I see no reason for that to change. The traditional way to enforce docility was to kill all the troublemakers, but unless you do it on a sufficiently massive scale to impact the gene pool, it only lasts for a generation. A population with forced permanent docility -- guess whose dream would that be?
Sure. My connotations of "docility" differ (what are altruism or modesty doing in there??), but let's just taboo the word.
What I mean is basically obedience to authority plus willingness to please. When told to sit down and shut up you say "Yes, sir", sit down, and shut up -- and you like it. When told "Go do this" you go and do this. It's the difference between wolves and dogs.
Thanks for clarifying your position. I'll use the word "submissiveness" to refer to this if you don't mind.
All the people you describe are powerful, but cops and warlords have only limited ability to affect legislation in democratic countries. So I'll focus on rich people and bureaucrats.
Some thoughts:
The time horizon is long here... most people aren't sufficiently good at delayed gratification to plan on a 20 year timescale, and that's how long it takes for children to grow up. And then it takes another 20 years or so for them to be a large fraction of the adult population. That's half a lifetime.
More importantly, the classic hypocrisy scenario is when people are benevolent when a question is presented in a way that primes far mode ("Corruption is wrong") but somehow their preferences change when a short-term opportunity presents itself ("Man, I really need some money to cover my loans... I'll ask for a bribe just this once. It's not like I'm doing anything wrong really, just offering them the ability to accelerate their application.") Things that affect events 20 years out are more likely to prime far mode.
This plan has social desirability bias working against it. Joe Bureaucrat goes up to his colleague and says "Hey Liz, the citizenry will be far easier to subjugate 20 years down the line if we write submissiveness in to this new law." Mr. Burns steeples his fingertips and chuckles: "My portfolio companies will find themselves profiting nicely once everyone is a submissive little consumer who buys everything they see on TV." The perpetrators will need to coordinate with scientists in order to draft their legislation, and they'll need a plausible rationalization for why they're mandating submissiveness (rather than, say, other crime reduction options like altruism) in order to coordinate on the effort effectively.
In principle, any law passed regarding this would also affect the children of rich people and bureaucrats. So they'd either have to deal with the fact that their kids would also be submissive or find some way around the law, probably by traveling. Traveling could allow them to circumvent other restrictions too. One failure mode would be a society where most are trusting and submissive, but many foreign-born individuals are dominant and sociopathic. This could also arise if different countries had different restrictions and unrestricted immigration was allowed between countries. This gives every country an incentive to put at least some steel in the spine of their citizenry.
It's not exactly clear the degree of control we have here. Ultimately we're having this discussion in the hopes that our conclusions will be implemented somewhere and somehow... perhaps by scientists working on genomics, perhaps by some altruistically motivated lobbyist, etc. My guess would be that anyone advocating for legislation could also make it clear what the legislation shouldn't do, but it's possible that their control wouldn't be that fine-grained, and they'd find themselves initially pushing for legislation that they eventually didn't endorse.
By the way, I noticed that you've been a bit antagonistic and cynical during this discussion, with a strong "us vs them" type framing. I'm wondering if anyone (including you) has any thoughts on how I could have presented this issue in a way made it less likely to get politicized. It seems like once an issue gets politicized it's tough to un-politicize it. I have half a mind to delete my post for that reason; maybe a different discussion on a different day will turn out better if everyone just forgets about this one.
You are looking for basically political answers so I can't see how are you going to avoid politics. Your OP mentions as potential solutions things like "mandatory birth control technology" and "require designer babies to possess genes for..." These are coercive political solutions.
Yes. I'm usually cynical as I find this to be the epistemically correct posture.
As to antagonistic, I did mention at one point that we have a radical value-level disagreement. Perhaps you didn't notice that, permit me to elaborate.
I don't like the world that you're proposing. I wouldn't want to live in it and I would work to prevent it from happening. This is not a minor disagreement about which of the nice adjectives are nicer.
You're arguing for the world where everyone is made docile with the "connotations of trust, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness". I am none of these things, literally, not a single one. I will not fit in your world, I will not like being in it and I won't like most of the people there. If I were to have children and someone would insist on making them genetically docile, I would object very strongly and very forcefully.
Does that clarify things?
I guess I have this naive idea that on Less Wrong we can have friendly, thoughtful discussions of politics without getting divided in to tribes. Does this seem like an ideal worth aiming for?
You misread me, or I miscommunicated, or something :) Let me clarify: I have no proposals regarding trust, compliance, modesty, or tender-mindedness. And I didn't mean to communicate any such proposals. When I said I was "leaning towards [docility] being a good thing", I said that mainly because I perceived the word "docility" to have altruistic connotations.
I think we can both agree that enhanced psychopaths seem like a bad thing, right? So then the question is whether it makes sense to take measures to prevent people from engineering their babies to be enhanced psychopaths. I'm currently leaning towards no, in part through objections you've raised and in part through my guess that few people would deliberately choose to have an antisocial baby.
I think maybe our discussion hit a snag at some point because you incorrectly diagnosed me as someone who had values significantly different than yours. At this point you (probably rationally) decided to take an antagonistic pose in order to try to speak out against those values of mine that you disagreed with, and it became harder for us to toss ideas around, stay curious, and share evidence about things. (These are all things you do in a collaborative discussion with someone who shares your values, but are arguably counterproductive for achieving one's goals in a discussion with someone who doesn't share your values.) Hopefully the last paragraph clarified things some.
In any case: I'm a consequentialist utilitarian, so I care about everyone's preferences when designing my utopias, which includes yours. I don't think I'm your enemy. When it comes to government regulation, I'm a pragmatist: I'm in favor of whatever seems likely to work. And yes, failures of previous regulations contribute to that estimate.
This discussion was reasonably friendly by internet standards. No one called anyone a troll, accused him of lying, or decided to discuss his sexual peculiarities :-) No one got doxed or swatted :-D
I also don't see much of a division into tribes. Two individuals can perfectly well have a political disagreement without serving merely as representatives of warring tribes. I, for one, don't believe I am representing any tribe or any political consensus here, it's just my own beliefs and viewpoints.
But you would prefer the population to move (or be moved) in that general direction? You said, and I quote:
and later you explained what did you mean by "docile". Did you change your mind?
Why do you believe the diagnosis was incorrect?
Yes :) We're not doing that badly.
Did you see the clarifying edit in this comment? After thinking a little harder, I realized that the only reason docile people seemed good is because the term suggested altruism to me.
I'm hoping that "more babies should be born altruists" is something almost everyone can agree on. It seems like a proposal even a sociopath could get behind: more suckers to take advantage of :P (Note that it's possible to be a disagreeable/heretical/cynical altruist; in fact, I know a couple.)
Brainstorming reasons why people wouldn't like living in a world with lots of young altruists:
The young altruists will badger older folks to change their behavior, e.g. switch to a vegan diet, embrace the cause du jour, or just imply that they're bad people since they don't devote lots of time and resources to altruism related stuff (or act morally superior).
The older non-altruists would like to make friends with other non-altruists. Although there are lots of non-altruists who are their age to make friends with, maybe they would like to make friends with young people for some reason. Maybe to broaden their horizons, or maybe they've accumulated grudges against most non-altruists their age by this point, or some other reason.
It turns out to be impossible to genetically enhance altruism on its own without enhancing all the other facets of agreeableness along with it, which cause their own set of problems.
These seem like reasons to think that the socially ideal center of the altruism distribution should trend a bit more towards selfishness than it would otherwise.
Do any of these apply to you? Can you think of others?
But altruism was in his list along with trust, compliance, etc. So I don't think you actually answered his objections.
If I tell you I don't want to eat foods made using vomit, excrement, or bile, and you tell me "well, the food doesn't contain any vomit or bile", that's not really very comforting.
It would, if it didn't keep getting disproven.
That said, designer babies aren't an issue that I would have thought to be more politically sensitive than average as transhumanist topics go -- it's a touchy subject in the mainstream, but not in a Blue/Green way, more in a "prone to generalization from fictional evidence" way. Learn something new every day, I guess.
As I mentioned in the reply to parent, I don't see tribal warfare here. We are not two faceless champions of the enemy tribes duking it out, we are just two individuals who disagree. Not every political disagreement must represent tribal affiliation.
Tribal warfare looks like this.
And "designer babies" is not a particularly politically sensitive topic. However control of how babies get designed, especially through laws and regulations, certainly is.
It brings up memories of other movements, backed by influential scientists, that gained widespread political appeal. Specifically, eugenics. Long before the term was associated with the Nazis, there were sincere eugenics movements in the United States that sought to improve the gene pool. There were laws on the books that provided for forced sterilization of the "unfit". It just so happened that the victims of these policies were poor and/or minorities.
Since then, there's always been a segment of the mainstream predisposed to distrust any talk of "improving" the population through scientific means. Any discussion of that topic will thus raise the Blue/Green specter.
Not fictional evidence, real world evidence of how powerful groups have sought to control, marginalize, destroy the agency of, and even eliminate marginal groups all across history including recent history.
True, except the people under discussion are not like that. You don't get to be a millionaire by having small time horizons.
Yes and Epictetus and Lumifer have explained who they will go about rationalizing this upthread (several times). If you want a civil discussion you could start by actually paying attention to what the people you're talking to are saying.
Or simply make the law sufficiently convoluted that it's possible to get out of it by jumping through bureaucratic hoops.
That's why I added the point about altruism being an alternative to submissiveness. But I agree that their point is basically a good one.
(In general you might read all my comments in this thread as just bringing up considerations that might be relevant so they can get discussed. I haven't come to any firm conclusions about this subject and don't intend to any time soon. Sometimes I don't bother writing my current belief state because I'm still updating and that would make my comments longer and less content-dense.)
My worry is less bureaucrats, for some of the reasons you describe (delayed gratification is not a characteristic of bureaucrats), but well-meaning social reformers. You can find an unending stream of people who will tell you that doing X or even believing X is antisocial behavior and a portion of them will want the next generation to be genetically programmed to avoid X and do Y instead--for everyone's own good, of course.
Good point.
Its times like this that i find what certain subgroups of LW dont find 'political' fascinating and hilarious. It says everything about the bubble from which they come.
China has already used selective breeding to breed very tall basketball players.
Shouldn't enjoyment of reading and loud parties be largely orthogonal? Personally I enjoy reading and raves and fighting (martial arts grappling, not pub brawls). But more to the point, I'm not sure this is the right definition of docile - books are far more dangerous than rock concerts.
I do however agree that its not obvious whether a "docile" citizenry is a bad thing.
I have noticed a negative correlation between "life of the mind" pursuits and "life of the party" pursuits. How much of that is because of skill specialization or deliberate signalling, rather than actual preference differences? Hard to say.
Sure, from the perspective of public safety or homeland security or whatever your favorite euphemism is. But I expect it's more likely for parents to be doing this sort of selection than governments, and from a parental perspective Das Kapital (or for that matter Atlas Shrugged) keeps your kids out of your hair and improves expected future grades rather better than whatever teen pop group is popular right now.
Governments will likely regulate it and can freely say that if a company makes designer babies it has to include certain genes.
Parents also won't be able to effectively interpret the evidence but will have to take advice from experts. Experts who design gene cocktails that they believe to be beneficial.
I wouldn't expect a regulatory body to have the expertise necessary to come up with its own set of mandatory gene variants to produce a politically convenient population, and I wouldn't expect a Western regulatory body to be able to get away with blatantly optimizing for political docility based on on other people's results, not in a field that a lot of people are already skeptical about. It's reasonable to expect some slant in that direction, and I might also expect to see variants banned if they were positively associated with things like aggression or criminality, but that's a much weaker form of optimization. Basically, I think we'd end up with something that looks more like the FDA than the Thought Police, or even like the FCC.
Experts would exist, of course, but I have no reason to believe that their incentives would point strongly in the direction of social control.
That sounds to me like "that won't happen because of the objections of people like you. Because it won't happen, there's no need to object to it".
I'm saying what I think would happen, not what should happen.
You can object to what you want, but a statement that starts "Governments will likely regulate it..." is a prediction, not an objection.
It's a prediction based on the existence of objections. If you use that prediction to then argue against the objections, it becomes self-defeating, since successfully using the prediction that way destroys the basis for being able to make the prediction.
I am not arguing against objections to government-mandated genetic modification. I am arguing that, as a matter of fact, Western governments in the near future are unlikely to fully exploit that kind of mandate, partly because those objections are common.
Analogously, I don't believe Western governments are likely, at the moment, to burn opposition literature en masse. It does not therefore follow that arguments for free speech aren't worth taking seriously -- just that the existence of a valid underlying principle doesn't imply imminent dystopian peril.