Comment by perching_aix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perching_aix | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> We're not that smart.

How do you determine that? We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons, and build machines that understand human language (if ever so fleetingly). Unless how we work is fundamentally betraying how we can reason about the world, and we find that that's intrinsically linked to our genetics, I really don't see us not cracking it eventually proper.

> Everything has unintended consequences.

People use medications every single day that are effective for what they are taking it for, yet have "unintended consequences" that are consciously ignored or are found otherwise negligible by them. Seems like unintended consequences are not a blocker. The criteria hasn't been perfection even up to this point, it's always been a desperation-driven best-effort. Much like life and civilization as a whole.

I can appreciate e.g. hesitance in taking on the responsibility of possibly being wrong about how something like this works - nature cannot be blamed, but humans can and that feels bad. But the alternative is pretty clear and is not going away on its own. I'm pretty sure at least that just like how genetic traits can be evolved multiple times independently, genetic defects can be too. This is also why I think to characterize this as eugenics is extremely and fundamentally wrong. Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on - a concept that flagrantly flies in the face of this independent recurrence effect, for one.

> We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons

The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.

> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on

Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.

I do not understand why you reposted your comment. I've already replied to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44618552

> We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons

The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.

> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on

Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance. They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.

I've posted a reply to this in haste, but it was a bit more emotionally charged than ideal. This is a reworded version that I believe reflects my thoughts more accurately.

> The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.

That is a very far removed interpretation of what I wrote. As I'm sure you're aware, nuclear bombs operate on fission (or in rarer cases, fission and fusion). These are atomic-scale processes, but do not involve atomic-scale control (or in some cases, even control at all - natural fission sites exist). A more faithful example for what I said would be semiconductor manufacturing, where the state of the art is 40-atoms wide tracks of patterning resolution. The atomic pick-and-place I describe was demonstrated, but has no practical implementations that I'm aware of (would be way too slow). But even if we go back to fission, nuclear plants are providing stable, relatively clean baseline power at reasonable costs, and for better or for worse, the world didn't yet descend into WW3 either, and it's more than fair to speculate that this is due to the temporary checkmate nuclear bombs provide us. So as far as I'm concerned, no, I think we're pretty alright still.

> Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“.

But your position doesn't seem to care much for if this assumption is correct or not. Even if it's bang-on perfectly correct, you stated that this is eugenics period, therefore it's bad. Was that not what you meant to suggest then?

> They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason.

How would you know? What if I disagree that reason and purpose are ontologically real?

> Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral.

I disagree that human genetics would be a conscious process, and that it can thus care about things. I also disagree that it can know anything about morals - morals are a human concept, and they're not even universally shared across us. Very clearly just the two of us seem to hold ourselves to very different definitions of what's moral, for example.

> It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.

I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?

I think FollowingTheDao has a point worth exploring and it's easy to be afraid of it because it sounds cruel and against modern individualistic thinking.

Genetic diseases that have survived a long time in our population may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall. He gave the example of sickle cell, but I also recently read about a similar idea with schizophrenia. Suppose we eliminate the schizophrenia genes from the gene pool? We would also lose the benefit they provide - probably to people who don't quite become schizophrenic.

> I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?

I think he is claiming that but the vast majority is future generations who die from some other problems that this "bad" mitochondrial DNA was protecting the rest of the population against.

I'm not sure if he meant "a moral" or "amoral" but genes evolve to ensure their own survival and that might be done more effectively by killing a few babies with mitochondrial disease as a side effect of something else.

These unknown benefits of genetic diseases might simply be keeping mutations out. Mutations are going to happen anyway and maybe it's useful to the species for them to be fatal instead of just degrading performance in life which might accumulate over generations. Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.

I do not think they have a point that can be explored much, or that they're suggesting an exploration of anything to begin with. I further think that the fear is on their side: fear from being associated with a historically malicious movement (eugenics), fear from being the possible culprit of unintended suffering (gene editing going wrong downstream) and thus having that responsibility, and fear of the disruption of some higher balance they believe exists (religion).

For example,

> may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall

How will we find this out if we espouse gene editing in general as bad?

From my perspective, like religious folks in general, they wish for leaving unknowns remain unknown and just being passive; unfortunately, I think this goes against the very essence of life, and our very fundamental biases that come from being alive and perceiving ourselves as sentient.

If I took their worldview to the extreme, I wouldn't be able to do anything: the smallest things would require a full and complete understanding of the entire state of the world, lest I might cause some unintended effect that may hurt me greatly, and so when I do do anything, I'm exhibiting hubris. This is also why I brought up healthcare in general being a best effort, because all active actions in life are at most a best effort due to the impenetrable wall between our perception of the world, and the world in its actuality.

To tie it back to your example:

> Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.

Think about how you can reset your graphics driver by pressing Win+Ctrl+Shift+B without having to restart your entire system. Or how you continue to write programs, despite not being able to guarantee that the code you write for those programs is actually what's going to execute, on the state you expect them to be executed on, in the environment you expect it to execute in, in a way you expect it to execute. You might get other programs inject themselves into your program, other programs manipulate the memory of your program, the system libraries you call into do something unexpected because 20 years have passed and now things are different, or simply being scheduled out and your program not even receiving CPU time, meaning if your program powered a real time experience, that now ceases to be that way.

There's a balance between best possible healthcare for all individuals and full blown eugenics. Neither extreme is very good, so yea it's worth at least trying to understand the consequences.

In the extreme of too much healthcare for too long, we'll breed humans into being dependent on it. That's a risk because if we somehow stop being able to provide that healthcare, we might die out. On the other hand, maybe we'll always be able to provide that healthcare and we'll become superior in some way as a consequence. This probably already happened with the technology of clothes, cooking, and houses. We depend on those because we're hopeless at digesting raw food and staying warm at night, whereas animals without those technologies are burdened by things like permanent fur coats and more expensive digestive systems, or having to slow down in the cold.

That's general healthcare. The issue here is different - "bad" genes are probably actually good at the population level so do we really want to get rid of them?

I'm not much of a luddite but I really don't think we should manually eliminate any "bad" genes from the gene pool. That's like trying to improve the environment by exterminating some troublesome species without realizing the indirect benefits it provides. Do you also call protecting endangered and apparently useless species a religious like fear of disruption of some higher balance?

> If I took their worldview to the extreme, I wouldn't be able to do anything:

So you obviously don’t understand my worldview. I don’t worry about the small things, I worry about the big things. But yes, so careful, because I have empathy. For example, it’s easy for me to throw a cigarette butt out of my window and it’s very convenient and it makes my life easier. But I know the consequences of that are many fold, starting fires, having animals eat the cigarette butt. So I don’t do it.

The topic is about genetic editing and just throwing in the mitochondria of some random woman into the cytostolic DNA of another woman. Does anyone know the effects of that yet, long-term? Not only for the population but for the child?

Has that even been examined before?

I'd assume no. How would they do that though if we all stood up, regarded this as eugenics, and banned it for good?

Where do you draw the line between small and big things though? I can appreciate if someone tries to go for paraconsistent logic rather than classical when thinking about the real world, but then I think it's important to establish where we both land in there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com