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Yvain comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong Discussion
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Given that there is a popular tendency for people to accuse even totally different things of being "eugenics" to discredit them, if you tried to rebrand eugenics as something else people would notice very quickly, they would "accuse" you of being eugenicist, and the debate about whether Plan Y is or is not a good idea would immediately shift to a debate about whether Plan Y is or is not eugenics - which you would lose, because it is.
This reminds me of an interesting analysis I heard about why Heartiste manages to hang on when many people who are much less horrible than he is get laughed off the Internet. If you write some very reasonable liberal enlightened essay about how maybe there's some reason to believe some women are such-and-such but we must not jump to conclusions, people will call you a sexist, you'll have to argue that you're not a sexist, and your opponents have spent their entire lives accusing people of sexism and are better at this argument than you are and will win (or at least reduce your entire output to defending yourself). If you're Heartiste, and people call you sexist, you can just raise an eyebrow, say "Well, yeah", and watch people whose only master-level argumentative gambit is accusing people of sexism have no idea what to do
Heartiste happens to be awful, but I'm pretty sure the same strategy could be applied to reasonable positions. If I wanted to start a site that promoted sexist positions, I would call it www.sexism.com.
If the human biodiversity people had called their movement neo-racism, they would have avoided having every mention of them devolve into painful non-debates like this one. Compare the neo-reactionaries, who are much more politically astute and who were entirely correct to call their movement neo-reaction.
It's about consequences of what you say.
If you say you like eugenics, the promotional consequences of your words are not limited to some nice, non coercive, purely voluntary eugenics. Instead, it is more or less spread over eugenics as frequently understood.
If you want to promote the voluntary measures, you say that you are pro choice, pro birth control, and believe that parents should have the right to improve health of their future children. If you want to also promote the involuntary variety, that's when you would say "I like eugenics".
AFAIK very few people use the improvement of the genes of the next generation as an argument in favour of pro-choice or pro-birth control positions -- such an argument would be automatically frowned upon by mainstream political circles, exactly because it's seen as "eugenics" (and hence racism) even without any coercion.
And "improve health of their future children" has the connotations of just avoiding disease or disability, rather than e.g. also increase the potential for high cognitive skills.
All in all I think I think that something like "I'd support strictly voluntary eugenics" would be much clearer in intent than what you suggest -- shorter too.
You can already choose to have or not to have children, or choose the mate, based on what ever motivation pleases you, including the notion of improving the human race. It's sort of like saying "I support strictly voluntary segregation". Whites and blacks already have enough freedom of movement to segregate themselves all they want.
Not really, since you have no way of keeping members of the other race from settling in your new neighborhood.
Well, you can adopt an ideology that members of the other race find more or less universally detestable and put up posters for it all across the neighborhood, but this has the consequence of filling your neighborhood with an ideology that lots and lots of people find detestable.
This assumes words have true, immutable meanings, which they don't.
For example, if you respond to the claim that Obama is a communist by...
Wait a second, you yourself explained this pretty well in your Anti-Reactionary FAQ: "The meaning of words changes over time, and the Cold War made the more moderate elements of communism drop the 'communist' label."
Accusations of "eugenics" generally deserve a similar response: meanings of words change over time, and the fact that a policy fits Galton's original definition of "eugenics" doesn't mean it's "really" eugenics any more than we should examine pre-Cold War communist documents to establish whether America is "really" a communist country.
Yes, arguing about definitions is annoying, but there's really no way around having to explain that no, policy Y is not what people commonly associate with "eugenics." The real choice you have is whether to alienate a portion of your audience from the outset by declaring you like eugenics.
And yes, ballsy countersignalling can sometimes work, but this doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea in every case. For example, I predict that politician who described her support for legal abortion by saying "I support murder in some cases" (*cough cough*) would have a very difficult time getting elected.
I don't think it assumes words have immutable meanings, just that they have some conventional meaning. You are proposing that we turn the debate from "Is eugenics plan x a good idea?" to "Does plan x, which fits the current conventional meaning of eugenics, sound like eugenics to you?" Unless you can unilaterally change the conventional meaning of eugenics, then for your purposes the meaning might as well be immutable - your argument will fail. And not only do people show no signs of being willing to shift the conventional meaning of eugenics in a pro-eugenics direction, but they seem very willing to shift the conventional meaning of eugenics in an anti-eugenics direction whenever anyone asks.
I think probably things inside and outside the Overton Window require different strategies. "Ballsy countersignaling" might work differently for things outside the window than for things inside of it. I agree that the politician shouldn't call abortion murder.