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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

There is a depressing # of voices here in this discussion which argue that ignorance is better than search for, however imperfect and fractional, knowledge, because humans (always some other humans) aren't capable of handling the truth.

I will try to argue against them from a pragmatic point of view.

The US sure is the top dog in scientific research, but far from the only dog. New competition has arisen, mostly Asian countries that do not care too much about historical Western traumas and sensibilities. The US is no more capable of blocking certain research worldwide that the Pope was, back in the Early Modern Era.

By blocking intelligence research in the US, the US is basically ceding the ground to those competing countries on ideological grounds. As a result, they will get ahead and possibly discover new facts.

(At this point, too many smart readers will wave the suggestion away with a bland "Intelligence is too complicated to be ever really understood." Sorry, I don't believe that. Intelligence is surely complicated, but so was atom splitting. It would be strange if there were never any results in the field, regardless of work spent.)

Which means that a generation or two down the road, strategic adversaries may have tech to alter intelligence and other mental traits, because they will know what to edit and how. Perhaps not that much, but who knows how genetic and epigenetic manipulation in human beings is going to look like in 2070.

Such an ability may prove even more world-changing than the atomic bomb, and the US is shooting itself in the foot by making sure that it won't be able to compete on the field early.

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> There is a depressing # of voices here in this discussion which argue that ignorance is better than search for, however imperfect and fractional, knowledge

You are being too generous. They argue for ignorance now, only because they are forced to by the starkness of the "do or do not" research question. Otherwise they would confidently claim every notion they dislike has been widely debunked (and give examples of 19th century studies getting debunked, while avoiding mention of any post-1950s research). When pressed, they would retreat to "it's complicated", and finally to "so what/you shouldn't care anyway" [1].

And when the discussion is over, they will immediately forget it, and revert to using an absolutist blank slatist assumption (with zero basis in research) to legitimize their politics, and deconstruct [2] their opponent's.

[1] "I don't have a dog. And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite. And if I had a dog and it did bite, it didn't bite you. And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog."

[2] Not just delegitimize, but deconstruct, i.e. "not only should you not care about those things, those things don't even exist, they are mere social constructs with no biological basis"

> "I don't have a dog. And if I had a dog, it doesn't bite. And if I had a dog and it did bite, it didn't bite you. And if I had a dog and it did bite, and it bit you, then you provoked the dog."

The name of this fallacy is "kettle logic".

Exactly this. What results from this field has the potential to be downright terrifying and dangerous on so many different dimensions.

Which is exactly why it should be studied, especially in a society where we still ostensibly have some semblance of respect for the individual.

The Cold War didn’t become a Nuclear War because both powers realized in some capacity that an arms race spurred by this very assumption that the other is creating ever more advanced technology which could threaten one’s power would ultimately just result in each country annihilating the other in the name of self defense/preserving power/stability/“peace”.

Who benefits from those “advances” in technology in that case?

To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place. Sure, nuclear weapons would likely have been theoretically discovered anyways, but did they need to be actually built? Did we need to execute on actually building and using nuclear weapons to understand practical use cases for nuclear energy?

Because I am certain that powers today in an arms race with each other could and would, by this logic, discover and unleash entirely new man-made horrors upon this world that make nuclear weapons look elementary, if this is the path we’re going to go down.

Just because some people choose to study eugenics does not mean we all have to (or should).

Your argument only works if you consider eugenics to be inherently unethical, which isn't necessarily true.

Previous attempts such as exterminating anyone with flawed genes was certainly unethical, but that was just an example of people drunk on power exercising it.

The benefits from ethical eugenic research would be to the whole society. You'd get less genetic illnesses, improved metabolisms, better eyesight etc. In theory it's basically just improving the odds of rolling good genetics for everyone.

It's certainly not going to be easy however, and to be frank: I doubt any of us will be alive by the time the research would bear fruits.

> Previous attempts such as exterminating anyone with flawed genes was certainly unethical, but that was just an example of people drunk on power exercising it.

IMO it really depends on how you're doing the extermination. Killing adults/children with the relevant genes is of course hilariously unethical. Killing fetuses with the same genes is very debatably unethical - as in, a lot of people will very strongly say it's unethical, but other societies will do so at >90% rates (see Down's in Iceland as an example).

I find it hard to think of a way in which editing an individual embryo to change the relevant genes is unethical besides the "changing anything is evil eugenics" objection.

> The Cold War didn’t become a Nuclear War because both powers realized in some capacity that an arms race spurred by this very assumption that the other is creating ever more advanced technology which could threaten one’s power would ultimately just result in each country annihilating the other in the name of self defense/preserving power/stability/“peace”.

I think the Cold War stayed cold because the potential downside of using weapons outweighed the potential benefits—-the use of a single nuke could only bring marginal benefits, but at the risk of Armageddon.

> To argue that dangerous/unethical/X research must be done just because a potential adversary is also doing that research is what armed the world with the nuclear option in the first place.

What was the alternative? To bury our heads in the sand and hope that the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets were too scrupulous to pursue a strategic advantage? C’mon.

Unilateral disarmament isn’t moral. It’s naive and dangerous.

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I'm so grateful for our individualistic society.

It’s strange to see this structure of argument: it effectively admits that we ought to do anything that a less scrupulous person or country would do, because (tacitly) we have more scruples. That’s never made any sense to me.

More seriously, it suggests that we ought to pursue any unethical domain so long as our perceived competitors will. Should the US have sunk billions into Lysenkoism[1] because the Soviets did, or phlogiston[2] research because there’s an off chance we’ve actually been wrong for the last 200 years?

In other words: this requires us to add a perverted normative glance to science, the kind you seem keen to avoid in the first place. Is it ideal that Americans get squeamish whenever intelligence is brought up? No. But doing something that’s largely failed to meet scientific standards just because another big country might do it doesn’t pass the smell test either.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

Okay, you can have that argument with a corporation. I'm having the argument with a taxpayer funded resource under the US Federal Government and it doesn't seem like a limitation it can create or sustain, legally. It should sell it off so you can have your argument.

This is a perfectly reasonable argument for any scientific funding, public or private. It’s arguably even more pressing in the public setting, given the civic interest in public institutions not funding junk science (or distributing private generic data).

I don’t see why this situation would be unsustainable for the USG. It’s not a particularly unusual one.

In WW2 you had all this "research" conducted by Dr Mengele and funded by the state. Should the US have done the same, just with taxpayer money? I know retroactively it's easy to say "no" but were you at that time presented with this dilemma?

How is this even remotely comparable? Mengele "experimented" on living people, inflicting truly horrendous amounts of pain and suffering on his patients, it doesn't compare even slightly to what we're talking about here.

The context is matching the eugenics research that China is known to have done, which includes human subject research. There was a pretty infamous example of embryo modification, IIRC, a couple of years ago.

In my view, this stuff is similar to firearms. Not unethical per se; only concrete use can be unethical.

But if the West collectively and unilaterally decided to reject firearms as such back then, it would likely have been gone by the 17th century.

Well, a firearm is a practical thing: it’s a weapon you hold in your arms and potentially use to kill people.

I think the Lesenkoism analogy is more appropriate here: our best science demonstrates, at the most, that our strongest attempts to genetically influence general intelligence have weak effects, if any. So it’s not so much latent danger (the way rejecting firearms would have stopped much of Western history) as it is poor science that produces limited value relative to its financial and civic costs.

First firearms were rather primitive as well. The English famously kept on to bow and arrow until the 16th century or so.

I am sure that complexity of genome and epigenome is huge and that we are just at the beginning of the journey. But unlike Lysenkoism, I believe that the underlying principles are sound.

But I disagree with the idea that you can easily measure value of science by its costs, especially short term.

Look no further than Katalin Kariko, one of the most important people in mRNA. They demoted her at UPenn in 1997 because they considered her research not valuable... and yes, it actually took 20 years for it to bear fruit.

> But unlike Lysenkoism, I believe that the underlying principles are sound.

Is this an expert opinion, or a lay opinion? Eugenics is one of those fields where there’s a split distribution: experts are generally less confident in the scientific value of eugenics research than the public is.

No domain is infallible, and science is by its nature unsettleable. But the fact that a particular academic department was unfair to a particular academic is not especially strong evidence that the scientific community is wrong, as a whole, about eugenics.

One of the problem is the constant use of the word "eugenics". Whatever will emerge as a result of current and future biological research, is not going to resemble old school eugenics from times when even the DNA wasn't understood.

You have a lot of results that are used in practice already today. Embryos in IVF are genetically screened to weed out serious issues, and so are often developing foetuses in natural pregnancies. Certain countries have genetic counseling to reduce frequency of locally important diseases such as Tay-Sachs.

Aren't these methods of preventing human suffering valuable?

We haven't really attempted to genetically influence intelligence because the most obvious ways of doing so are horrendously evil. This doesn't mean it cannot or should not be studied as the results could prove useful.

E.g. let's say we discover that there's a common defect in a particular gene makes aurul learning harder, then we can raise awareness and get schools to check if struggling students might do better with pictorial learning.

Knowing both that this mutation exists and how prevalent it is (and where!) is important for knowing if its worth expending limited school resources on alternative approaches.

Virtually nobody has a problem with individualized genetic treatment. We already have gene therapy, even customized gene therapy. Treating a hearing disorder, even before birth, is not particularly controversial (at least, no more controversial than any hearing treatments).

That’s discrete from eugenics as popularly understood, which involves large-scale engineering of the gene pool across generations. There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work, and near universal consensus that it’s unethical.

> There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work

This is completely false to such an extent that I've read it several times to see if I've misunderstood.

Humans have been breeding new varieties of plants and animals for millenia. Compare modern bananas to their ancient ancestors[1] or the modern chihuahua to its wolf ancestors. Heck, you can have substantial changes in just a dozen generations if your selective pressure is strong (or even one, if you sterilize every single light skinned person the next generation will be much darker skinned).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_type#/media/File%3AInsi...

We’re talking about humans, not bananas. Similarly, the implication with eugenics is that we can somehow improve general human intelligence or other desirable traits, not fruit bearing capacity. The scientific consensus is that we don’t even know what general intelligence is, much less which complex of genes produce it.

Edit: and, to be clear: the reason we can successfully breed bananas (or dogs) with desirable traits is because we aggressively cull the undesirable traits. I assume you understand what this would imply in human beings, and why this is unacceptable.

"That doesn't work" and "that's unethical" are not the same thing.

We can select for anything we can measure. E.g. if we did sperm harvesting from everyone who scored top marks in memory tests and sterilised the rest we'd get a population that's very good at memory tests (and probably also has better memory than today's average).

In theory we could attempt to measure general intelligence using a battery of tests for everything we can think of and this would probably improve general intelligence. It would probably also give us all Tay-Sachs.

"There’s general scientific consensus that the latter doesn’t even work"

Genetic counseling such as "when two people have the same recessive gene coding for a serious disease, they shouldn't have kids together" works very well and is used in many countries to suppress prevalence of various diseases.

The first country to introduce a program to suppress Tay-Sachs this way was actually Israel, the home country of Holocaust survivors. If they can tolerate it, so can the rest of the world.

Testing and counseling for Tay-Sachs is not the same thing as attempting to breed abstract desirable traits, like general intelligence.

Again: there is no major controversy over things like the former, and that’s not what’s popularly understood as eugenics. So it’s not clear how it rebuts the objection to what we’re actually talking about, which is the West matching the (potential) reactionary eugenics of China.

It is not the same, but not that different either. There is a gap of 150 years and a lot of technological development between the relatively simple Tipu Sultan bamboo rockets that rained on the British in 1799 and ICBMs that can carry a nuclear warhead across the globe, but it is not really a difference of kind. They are both solid-propellant rockets working on the same principle. It is possible that future genetic and epigenetic manipulation will be much more subtle than whatever we can do today.

Or perhaps you are addressing the categories. Well, "health" is, to some degree, socially defined. As is "disease".

There were times when homosexuality was classified as a disease. Not that distant times. Alan Turing (in)famously committed suicide because of that. As of now, scientists working in the longevity field are pushing for aging itself to be redefined as a disease.

Parents of heavily intellectually disabled kids would probably agree to any reasonably safe treatment that would help their kids, if such treatment existed. Not having enough general intelligence is a big obstacle in everyday life. HN gets an audience of mostly smart people; most of them cannot even begin to understand how cognitivelly loaded is contemporary world.

Lysenkoism was the denial of evidence-based genetic science motivated by political concerns. It elevates what powerful people will allow you to believe over an investigation into the truth free of any ulterior motives. I’m not sure that example demonstrates what you think it demonstrates. If anything, Lysenkoism held back the Soviets in competition with the West.

You just drew the connection: like Lysenkoism, eugenics is not good science. It’s reactionary sociology and political ideology wrapped in the language of genetics.

Because it isn’t good science, it isn’t clear what the Chinese have to benefit from it. That’s their mistake to make, not unlike the Soviets with Lysenkoism. But that doesn’t suggest that we should blindly copy their mistake.

You keep using the word "eugenics". I do not think it means what you think it means. Eugenics was the attempt to genetically improve human populations by either encouraging or forcing sterilization, abortion, and birth control among the poor and disabled. This was neither good science nor bad science, because it wasn't science at all, but rather a social and political movement as well as a set of governmental policies. (And, just as an aside, "reactionary" isn't quite the best characterization of the political ideology that motivated eugenics; eugenics was pioneered largely by American progressives roughly a century ago.) Analyzing genetic data that NIH is gatekeeping is not eugenics in any way, shape, or form.

While I don't know what you're talking about when you use the word "eugenics", I don't really need to because your argument has the same flaw regardless. Whatever "eugenic" hypotheses you're worried about, if they really are "bad science", the data will bear that out and the best solution is to disseminate that data as freely as possible rather than withholding it. Conversely, the only way bad science can be protected is by prohibiting inquiry and establishing dogma by fiat, which is exactly what happened in the case of Lysenkoism.

It is a known issue with social science that culture will bias research focus and conclusions that align with where the researcher lives. A typical finding is that US researcher tend to find research data that demonstrate individualistic virtues, while places like China and Russia tend to find research data that demonstrate collectivism virtues.

In general there are a few conclusion that should be drawn from that. One is that researchers tend to focus on research subjects that align with their own cultural biases, so while the data might be unbiased the choice of research subject is not. It is that naturally those researcher will have a harder time considering alternative explanation for a given set of data, even if that data itself is unbiased.

The key is always to consider culture into context of research and understanding how it limits the ability of the researcher, especially when politicians take such conclusions and runs with it.

This is a very vague response. I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to say — of course scientists are affected by the cultures they live in. But eugenics is not even good science, much less a popular social opinion. I believe that’s true just about everywhere.

Eugenics is politicians taking science of genetics and running with it in the context of certain cultural and political ideologies. The science of genetics is good and has significant contributed to medical science, historical research and our understanding of human, animals and plants. It has contributed to research of plants and animals, and the worlds ability to both feed people and to conserve the environment.

Eugenics is not science. It is a set of political beliefs and practices.

> Is it ideal that Americans get squeamish whenever intelligence is brought up?

But they don't get squeamish. They confidently claim there is no basis for intelligence (or personality in general) in genetics [1,2], then use any differences in behavior or outcomes as evidence of racism.

[1] I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. ― Stephen Jay Gould

[2] In fact, you did so in your very post, comparing the link between genes and intelligence to Lysenkoism or Phlogiston.

I don't know if you could have picked a worse quote to back up your point than footnote #1.

While it is likely true [0,1] that the mean/median of one group is more genetically intelligent-capable than the mean/median of a different group, the variance is going to make it so that there are extremely intelligent outliers in both groups. And if we're focused on intelligence and its products, the potential of those outliers being wasted due to slavery/poverty/racism/etc is the travesty being pointed out by the quote.

[0] Intelligence capability obviously relies on genetics. In the most obvious way, the genes of ursa americana result in a much less capable brain than the genes of homo sapiens. So, unless maximum "intelligence-capability" is the thing most strongly selected for (doubtful), genes that cause higher intelligence capability are going to be correlated with other genes that developed at the same time. But actually measuring that, in some objective way? I'd say you're better off focusing on the other end of trying to define what "intelligence" even is, at the computational level, and then the organizational level, before you can even think about judging the contributions of the biological substrate level.

[1] The reason this is generally ignored or even rejected is that it's an utter red herring. At most you can say it influences individual outcomes by a tiny bit, while being overwhelmingly swamped by the larger issues of culture, nurture, environment, access to resources, and overarching personality. Meanwhile, less intelligent people love to reference their race as evidence of their own intelligence/virtue/etc, because happenstance attributes of their existence are their primary "accomplishments". So it's best to not add fuel to that fire.

I apologize, I should have included more context. While the quote by Gould is obviously true in a literal sense, Gould himself was in the business of debunking "biological determinism" [1]. In that light, the quote is an admission that he does not care about truth, that his research is a mere means to, or foundation for, a political end. I.e. Lysenkoism.

[1] Calling it "determinism" sets up a clever strawman by giving the impression that only genes matter, and environment has no effect. Strengthening the strawman case is how his book on the subject devotes many pages to debunking 19th century science. And doesn't even get that right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Reassess...

Wasted potential due to slavery/poverty/racism is a travesty, I agree with that 100%. Thankfully this is a much smaller concern than a century ago.

A bigger problem in the present day, however, is the wasted potential from polices that come from the denial of difference.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210612203955/https://www.washi...

I didn’t compare genetic general intelligence to Lysenkoism. I compared eugenics to it; the critical difference is the misguided conceit that we can engineer general intelligence.

And yes, lots of Americans correctly identify that racism plays a significant role in perceptions of intelligence. This doesn’t alter the fact that many are squeamish about discussing it directly.

I don’t know if it will be commonplace in 50 years, but I think it will in 250. This seems like deciding to not study topics might have elements of discomfort at substantial risk of becoming the subservient population to groups with assisted tech (or even just a better understanding of developmental nutrition and environmental factors).

250 years is a long, long time in tech and science. 250 years ago, Watt was just coming up with the first efficient steam engine.

You can actually already edit genome of living things today, using tools such as CRISPR. Granted, they are still rather primitive, but they are getting better.

I am almost positive that by 2070, genetic engineering will be as ubiquitous as semiconductors are today.

I mostly agree with you, though the natural rate-limiting cycle time of edit-to-observe is much longer in human developmental genetics than in software or semiconductors.

The problem seems exacerbated in the US, because of the association of culture with genes and sub categories of citizens based on these crystallized association. It would be far less problematic if US society viewed and recognized only one big group of American citizens with a shared culture, with their specific history and genes being individual and private matter, like in some other countries (not to say it’s all rosy there, but at least there is that). These research could still be extrapolated but only to arbitrary group of individuals with no official existence, instead of well defined “races” like in the US. Of course it’s just an outsider reflection, I may get things wrong here.

> Which means that a generation or two down the road, strategic adversaries may have tech to alter intelligence and other mental traits, because they will know what to edit and how.

We know that we'd improve the intelligence of children across the board if we had free school lunches and classes started at 11am. That's pretty low hanging fruit for a country with our resources, so why haven't we accomplished this?

>By blocking intelligence research in the US, the US is basically ceding the ground to those competing countries on ideological grounds.

Just in the 20th century USSR similarity banned Genetics and Cybernetics. While keeping ideological purity it had to sacrifice agriculture developments and, later, computers. The Genetics alternative, funnily enough, had been Lysenkoism, which is also something we can observe in the US nowadays.

If I understand your argument correctly, the US should abandon attempts at preventing eugenics because other countries will do it?

Preventing research =/= preventing eugenics.

eugenics =/= unethical eugenics.

If you screen your embryos for downs syndrome, you are practicing eugenics.

If you screen your fetus for any genetic defects, you are practicing eugenics.

If you want smart kids and want a smart spouse, you are practicing eugenics.

So all eugenics is ok? I’m confused at what point you’re making?

I thought it was pretty clear.

eugenics =/= unethical eugenics

that’s like saying “good murder is different than bad murder” — adding an adjective doesn’t actually change what it is, nor the morality around it

Well if I come in the middle of the night at your house with a gun, you killing me is different than me killing you.

"Eugenics" actually just means attempting to improve the genome our children will have. This does not need to involve forced sterilisation or indeed the government at all.

E.g. giving all parents free genetic screening and genome correction for their fetuses if they wish it would be eugenics.

"Murder" itself contains a moral judgment and is actually banned.

Some forms of eugenics are routinely practised in the West already. For example, pretty much every IVF clinic out there will recommend patients to scrap embryos that are proven to be aneuploid. (So either not viable, or, in some cases, viable but with Down syndrome.) This is accepted everywhere I know and is considered a part of your reproductive rights.

How is this not "good eugenics"? How would you frame it as unethical?

Ok, but how is that relevant to the discussion about restricting data to prevent unethical eugenics?

Because it’s incredibly difficult a priori to restrict only research that could lead to unethical eugenics without restricting that which could lead to ethically sound, widely beneficial eugenics or even unrelated advances.

You can (for example) ban research on things might lead to the development of novel poisons. But that ban is almost sure to prevent the development of some new cancer treatments.

What “positive eugenics” do you imagine coming out of research on the genetics of intelligence?

I mean one that would generally benefit mankind as a whole?

Anything that increases the health outcomes of humans in the long-run would be broadly beneficial and could stem from research that's initially targeted at understanding the role genetics plays in intelligence. That could be breakthroughs in early childhood (or lifelong) nutritional support, eradication of diseases, creating lower susceptibility to some forms of cancer or heart disease, improvements in pedagogy, improvements in general intelligence, lower susceptibility to cognitive decline.

Research is not laboring to progressively color in a pre-defined picture, where you can just tell research scientists "don't color in the naughty bits".

How is gene linked to intelligence related to "eradication of diseases, creating lower susceptibility to some forms of cancer or heart disease"?

The genes that impact those things aren't being restricted?

Do you have a list of all the genes and all the things that they impact, even slightly, alone and in combinations? That list in itself would seem to be extraordinarily valuable, perhaps even Nobel Prize winning.

We don't know what unrelated items or generally applicable patterns we might find when we go looking into basic research.

As a concrete example, it’s completely plausible that understanding the genetic basis of cognitive ability could inform treatment of dementia.

Do you consciously avoid procreating with partners who are ugly or stupid, or somehow undesirable?

If so, you're practicing eugenics!

I never understood the argument that genetic engineering must be bad because someone once practiced it in a evil way.

It's tantamount to claiming we shouldn't do brain surgery because someone once practiced it by drilling holes in people's heads to remove demons.

At some point you have to question the effects you have as an individual on the rest of society. The implicit axiom that "doing what's in your own best interest is not unethical" clashes with the fact that this often means seeking unfair advantages or worse, normalizing them.

Eugenics at scale seems inherently unethical to me because its purpose and effects are contradictory under any moral justifications I can think of, except that which basically say "I deserve this power because I have it."

If we can't distribute a vaccine universally and equitably, we definitely can't eugenics. It will always boil down to who has the most proximity to the resources.

On the individual level the purpose of eugenics is to make your life better. But if it's done on a societal scale, then that reason becomes increasingly meaningless. It's all too often co-opted into nationalistic, corporate, or blind structures which you might not even notice as an individual.

I hope this sort of thing will be treated like high-tech weaponry, even if not weaponized. On the individual level I want the most protection possible, but I'm not allowed to get a Sherman tank, at least not very easily.

If you want to be reductive about it, then the answer is yes. Or do you think that some stern moralizing talking points directed at Russia or China will stop them? That seems to only be a tactic successfully deployed in the United States.

An argument could be made about setting an example, which US as the leading country still is in some ways for Russia and China, whether they want it or not, especially for the people if not the gov.

I guess I don't think that Russia and China too much care about the "example" that the United States sets for them.

Oh they do. Even some staunch putinists would say Russia is following US/western example (like of meddling in foreign country affairs in case of Ukraine).

I am reading this with contact lenses in my eyes. How is that different from a potential future intelligence magnifier?

We take it for absolutely granted that people's weaknesses and handicaps get compensated with inventions all the time. Organ transplants, artificial limbs, immunotherapy for cancer.

If it turned out that intelligence tends to correlate with depression, but the depressive part could be tuned out, would it be ethical to let the individuals suffer from depression and deny them a potential cure?

As far as eugenics goes, it is already to a large degree performed by proxy: the elites intermarry. But we are not really talking eugenics here; I am almost positive that in the second half of the century, genetic and epigenetic alterations in living adult humans will be commonplace.

I'm not comfortable playing MAD/prisoners dilemma with stakes this high. If other people are, and the systems we make put those people in charge, then maybe it's for the best. Perhaps we'll destroy ourselves so thoroughly no civilization could rise from the amniotic goo, let alone one that takes wargames so seriously.

> By blocking intelligence research in the US, the US is basically ceding the ground to those competing countries on ideological grounds. As a result, they will get ahead and possibly discover new facts.

Couldn't the same be said about the OG Nazis? All of their medical "experiments" on prisoners of concentration camps [1] were unethical, there wasn't even anything of note found out because they were either shit at documenting "experiments" or the "experiments" were just the personal dreams of sadistic "doctors".

There are lines we damn well shouldn't cross, and where it is worth we should sanction violators. We are supposed to have learned from "historical Western traumas and sensibilities", because if not then all the suffering would have been in vain.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/ns-aerzte-experimente-an-k...

Are you equating database queries to forced lethal and debilitating medical procedures on prisoners?

You do realize that database queries were an essential part of what made the foundation for the Nazi genocide [1]?

Genocides always begin with data.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...

Most genocides in history didn't rely on any data (Caesar or Genghis Khan certainly didn't run any population analysis before putting entire cities to the sword) and most databases have never been used for a genocide. The correlation is weak.

What actually prevents genocides is good institutions, not deliberate ignorance.

> What actually prevents genocides is good institutions, not deliberate ignorance.

And you would trust China in that, a country that locks up Muslims in concentration camps and surveillances its citizens to a degree the Soviet KGB and German Stasi wouldn't have dreamt of?

China needs to be reined in and that soon.

I agree with your first sentence. China cannot be trusted. I grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia, I have no illusions about totalitarian states.

All the more reason why not leave the entire field of human genetics exclusively to them - imagine a future in which rich and influential people can get treatments for certain deadly diseases only in Shanghai and Beijing and China demands not only money, but allegiance for keeping them alive.

As for your last sentence: this ship has sailed some twenty years ago. At the current stage, China can only seriously damage/destroy itself from within. Totalitarian states are weaker than they appear, though. It may very well happen.

I don't think the US is ceding any ground personally. They are probably doing the research intensely but just not public all. All the research done by Nazi's was absorbed by the US during operation paperclip. Most of those heinous nazi scientists were rewarded for their cutting edge work by the US.

Just like paperclip and mkultra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra)[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.

> there wasn't even anything of note found out because they were either shit at documenting "experiments" or the "experiments" were just the personal dreams of sadistic "doctors".

As far as I know pretty much all we know about the effects of exposure to cold temperatures from frostbite to eventual death was found in Japanese and German prison camps in WW2. Quite reasonably so, I imagine it to be hard to find volunteering participants for a study where the proposal is "we'll freeze you to death".

The problem is there is no way to measure intelligence objectively. Every intelligence test ever devised either measures something else unintentionally (usually prior knowledge/communication skills), or nothing at all. Your response that it _could_ be done doesn't actually refute that it hasn't. Sending a man to walk on the sun feels as impossible now as sending a man to walk the moon 100 years ago.

Do I think we're behind as a country because NASA isn't sending people to the sun now? No.

I'm universally fine with waiting until there's a theoretically viable approach before throwing random innocent lives at things which have no evidence of working even in theory.

When you say "there is now way", are you saying that we don't currently have a way, or that it's impossible to do? If it's the former, more research would certainly help.

I don't find it valuable to say "impossible". I've said that pretending we're at that point now is harmful.

But the same argument that they have against research in genetics applies there too, doesn't it? Attempting to measure intellectual capacity assumes that there can be a difference and tries to make that visible.

Or, as others in this thread have argued: how should the person feel that doesn't get a high score, and shouldn't we outlaw research in that area to make sure they don't feel bad?

No. I don't believe we should outlaw research that makes people feel bad. I predict that there's functionally very little genetic difference in cognitive abilities because human beings are simply far too similar (this does not say "exactly the same") to each other in all other measurable attributes. Still, it's moot because we can't measure intelligence and pretending we can isn't scientific.

Back in the early 19th century when electricity was being studied by the pioneers of the domain, there wasn't any understanding what electricity even means; people like Ampere, Volta and Ohm were alive, but the units named after them weren't.

This didn't prevent the field into developing into what it is today, acquiring more knowledge along the way.

As of today, we measure intelligence using tests on paper. In the future, it might be done using something like MR or CT, only more sophisticated. We can certainly map some cognitive processes in ways like that already, so it does not seem as absurd as walking in 6000 Kelvin on a gassy surface.

Regardless of if it is or isn't possible in the future, until there's evidence all the NIH is doing is preventing people from spreading pseudoscientific claims. I've no problem with saying mislabeling a key statistic in a study isn't scientific, especially when that is provably the plan ahead of time.

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