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gjm comments on Lesswrong 2016 Survey - Less Wrong
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Can you explain your reasoning, please?
I'm not Houshalter, but: beauty is mostly a positional good (if everyone in the world were one notch less attractive, nothing would be terribly different) whereas intelligence is not (if everyone in the world were one notch less intelligent, it would almost certainly be really bad for the world's economic and technological progress).
[EDITED to add:] ... And therefore if you use a "what if everyone did it" criterion for distinguishing good actions from bad, intelligence enhancement looks distinctly better than attractiveness enhancement.
This argument works in the short term but I'm not sure if it works in the long term.
There's probably a limit or at least diminishing returns to beauty, because there are limits to how symmetrical a face is, how large eyes are, how shiny hair is, how tall a person grows, and what is achievable via genetic engineering.
If everyone in the next generation is genetically engineered for beauty, the amount of variation should decrease. That would be good, in part because today we suffer from beauty superstimuli from seeing media of the most beautiful people in the world. (Past generations don't matter because older people can't compete on beauty anyway.)
Also, "what if everyone did it" doesn't work in the real world; you have to consider defecting strategies. And a single defector that enhances their beauty would be very successful. The only stable equilibrium is for everyone to enhance.
The problem is cost, including opportunity cost and tradeoffs inherent in genetic optimization for a certain purpose, all being invested towards a goal with diminishing returns. But I would at least support genetic enhancements of beauty that don't come at the cost of other genetic modifications, merely at the cost of dollars.