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skeptical_lurker comments on Thoughts on minimizing designer baby drama - Less Wrong
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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.