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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
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Remember there's not a trade-off here. I think most people want their kids to be at least a little bit smarter than they are. And if parents know that all the other parents are maxing out the "intelligence" dial, I think they will want to as well. Parents compete against one another to have the best kids. Maxing out the "intelligence" dial is an easy way to compete.
It's true that any laws about what genes to give your baby might end up being bad laws. So it's possible that we'd be better off with no laws at all. I think most parents would prefer not to give birth to a psychopath, so maybe it's not necessary to have a law against giving birth to a psychopath. I know I would prefer to have a kid who is more compassionate and benevolent than I am, but I'm not sure if this tendency is universal.
One idea is to make certain changes mandatory only if you're having a designer baby, and not make having a designer baby mandatory.
I don't know about that. I feel pretty certain there will be trade-offs, we don't know yet of what kind and how severe.
So, I switch on a TV and lo and behold! The Kardashian sisters! They clearly won at life. So if I want my daughters to win at life like them, what do I maximize? X-)
In your social circle intelligence is paramount, in others -- not necessarily.
The opposite of obedient to authority is not "psychopath", it's "troublemaker". Like Richard Feynman, for example.
It looks as if you're responding to JM4 as if he's claiming "it's OK to have laws requiring babies to be tweaked for obedience to authority, because that's how we avoid getting psychopaths". But it looks to me as if he's actually claiming "There won't be laws requiring babies to be tweaked for obedience to authority -- the populace wouldn't stand for it. What there might be is laws requiring them to be tweaked for not-being-psychopaths, and that would be OK".
It's perfectly reasonable to be concerned that what there would actually be is a law called the Psychopathy Prevention Act whose text, when read carefully, in fact requires babies to be tweaked for obedience to authority. But if indeed that's what would happen then JM4's problem is not that he approves of enforcing obedience to authority but that he is making a wrong prediction about future politics.
I mostly have slippery slope concerns here. Once you've given the government the right to choose some -- any -- characteristics of your children, I fear the list of these characteristics can only expand.