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're arguing for the world where everyone is made docile with the "connotations of trust, altruism, compliance, modesty, and tender-mindedness".
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.
Let me clarify: I have no proposals regarding trust, compliance, modesty, or tender-mindedness. ... 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.
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.
I previously wrote a post hypothesizing that inter-group conflict is more common when most humans belong to readily identifiable, discrete factions.
This seems relevant to the recent human gene editing advance. Full human gene editing capability probably won't come soon, but this got me thinking anyway. Consider the following two scenarios:
1. Designer babies become socially acceptable and widespread some time in the near future. Because our knowledge of the human genome is still maturing, they initially aren't that much different than regular humans. As our knowledge matures, they get better and better. Fortunately, there's a large population of "semi-enhanced" humans from the early days of designer babies to keep the peace between the "fully enhanced" and "not at all enhanced" factions.
2. Designer babies are considered socially unacceptable in many parts of the world. Meanwhile, the technology needed to produce them continues to advance. At a certain point people start having them anyway. By this point the technology has advanced to the point where designer babies clearly outclass regular babies at everything, and there's a schism between "fully enhanced" and "not at all enhanced" humans.
Of course, there's another scenario where designer babies just never become widespread. But that seems like an unstable equilibrium given the 100+ sovereign countries in the world, each with their own set of laws, and the desire of parents everywhere to give birth to the best kids possible.
We already see tons of drama related to the current inequalities between individuals, especially inequality that's allegedly genetic in origin. Designer babies might shape up to be the greatest internet flame war of this century. This flame war could spill over in to real world violence. But since one of the parties has not arrived to the flame war yet, maybe we can prepare.
One way to prepare might be differential technological development. In particular, maybe it's possible to decrease the cost of gene editing/selection technologies while retarding advances in our knowledge of which genes contribute to intelligence. This could allow designer baby technology to become socially acceptable and widespread before "fully enhanced" humans were possible. Just as with emulations, a slow societal transition seems preferable to a fast one.
Other ideas (edit: speculative!): extend the benefits of designer babies to everyone for free regardless of their social class. Push for mandatory birth control technology so unwanted and therefore unenhanced babies are no longer a thing. (Imagine how lousy it would be to be born as an unwanted child in a world where everyone was enhanced except you.) Require designer babies to possess genes for compassion, benevolence, and reflectiveness by law, and try to discover those genes before we discover genes for intelligence. (Edit: leaning towards reflectiveness being the most important of these.) (Researching the genetic basis of psychopathy to prevent enhanced psychopaths also seems like a good idea... although I guess this would also create the knowledge necessary to deliberately create psychopaths?) Regulate the modification of genes like height if game theory suggests allowing arbitrary modifications to them would be a bad idea.
I don't know very much about the details of these technologies, and I'm open to radically revising my views if I'm missing something important. Please tell me if there's anything I got wrong in the comments.