The Future of Education: Genetic Enhancement and Metahumanities [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Education: Genetic Enhancement and Metahumanities [pdf]

jetpress.org

7 pointsThevet6 comments

The author only mentions heritability once in the article. While educational attainment is also heritable people tend to view it as 'extrinsic.' The seemingly intrinsic nature of genetic modification is largely what drives moral reactions against it and the fact that any offspring will also retain those changes. This is of course also true for extrinsic factors that are also heritable but due to the quirk that human beings have a sense of their bodily self which is distinct from the rest of the universe we tend to distinguish between the two (probably to our detriment). That said people trying to distinguish use of any tool to 'fix' an abnormality vs 'enhance' something that is normal are idiots because the distinction is merely one of perspective around whether something is 'broken' or not. Frankly the world would be a whole lot better off if everyone had a IQ > 130 (functionally, since we would renormalize).

>That said people trying to distinguish use of any tool to 'fix' an abnormality vs 'enhance' something that is normal are idiots because the distinction is merely one of perspective around whether something is 'broken' or not.

man, while i fully support speeding up the evolution through all the means possible, your statement is kind of self-contradictory: you use "normal", and thus implicitly you bring up the notion of some distribution with clear notion of "normal", ie. some well distinguishable significant mass at the center and thus the 'fix'/'enhance' difference becomes very well defined (not just merely one of perspective) - 'fix' is moving up toward the mean/center mass while 'enhance' is moving up toward the mass's upper edge and away from it.

I will plead that I am using normal in the normative (and thus subjective) fashion but even in a positive fashion you still have to pick the values you choose to measure. You can't simply reduce a phenotype to a single dimension of good/bad and try to push it back to the middle. See for example the giant literature reflecting the many gains of function that accompany learning disabilities. If I take my meds to fix only the 'bad' parts aren't I somehow gaining a leg up because I have an advantage along another dimension? Probably an even better example is bipolar disorder where the current 'fix' makes the person catatonic, a clear loss since they are often highly productive during mania. The reason I bring these up is because they are better edge cases than something like cystic fibrosis (which is a better fit for your argument) where there isn't really much debate (and doesn't fit with the article). Other single gene causes of mental disability might also be a better fit for the 'pure normal' but what happens when we discover a 2 gene source of mental disability? How about 10? How about 100? Where do you draw the line between mental disability and just being stupid? If I feel sorry for zygotes that will grow up to have average IQ because many of the most beautiful things in the universe are beyond their grasp. Does the fact that they will be 'average' mean their parents should be denied the ability to give them the gift of one day having deep insight into the beauties of the universe? This is a longwinded way of saying that I think part of this issues is because many people in our society conflate 'normal' with 'best,' the result is that they argue that it is ok bring someone back to the average but that somehow anything beyond that is immoral. What kind of sick society doesn't want every member to lead the most fulfilling, contributing, and meaningful life possible? Sure there are plenty of arguments about certain treatments being out of reach of the poor, but to bring things back to the original article: have you seen the prices of private schools lately?

Those that think there is anything new in transumanism should read the 20th century arguments for eugenics, that is essentially what we're talking about albeit with a shiny new techno-hipster coating. This is not speeding up evolution, evolution encodes meaningful adaptations to an environment over eons, not fashionable "enhancements" to a persons "IQ"(however that happens to be measured) that may change from year to year. There is a holistic reality that is so blindly and eagerly thrown off by dreaming of the wonders of a brave post/transhuman future it makes one wonder at what point the post-posthumanists will circle back around and want to recover their true humanity unsullied by their forebears ham-handed tinkering. Good luck with all that, personally I'll stick with my boring old unmodified plain humanness.

You can't really prevent people from practicing eugenics though.

At the lowest level it manifests as dating preferences - everyone prefers to breed with those they find mentally and physically attractive.

Direct genetic manipulation is just a stronger way of expressing those preferences.

Would you kill defective babies who wouldn't survive let alone procreate before 20th century medicine had arrived?

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