8 ms·

This kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line. "Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my r

This kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line. "Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!" In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these. With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual). I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?

xvector 10mo ago
We have become too risk averse as a species to make any real progress on this front. Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. Hunter-gatherers setting off in an unknown direction in search for more abundant pastures, knowing that their survival was unlikely. Everything we have is thanks to them. Today we sit on our laurels, unwilling to take trajectory-changing bets because things might go wrong. In our risk paralysis, human evolution will come to a standstill, and that is a disservice to all future humans. No longer can an individual family or group of humans set out in that direction in search of a better future. They will be thrown in prison for daring to instead.
- dsign 10mo ago
  I often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?
- fruitworks 10mo ago
  There aren't any risks to take. Modern society is approaching a steady-state solution. Eugenics and artificial selection results in monocultures. In the long run has the opposite effect of what you're describing.
  - xvector 10mo ago
    I think it is fairly shortsighted to think that modern society is approaching "steady state" when we are on the "stick" part of the hockey stick curve of progress. There are plenty of risks to take today (with things like gene editing - which does not mean "monoculture") and there will be plenty of trajectory-changing risks to take tomorrow.
  - energy123 10mo ago
    Maybe it's not risk-aversion, but an adjacent concept I'll call stifled freedom of action. It's very hard to just do stuff nowadays. For example, building something on your land, selling stuff to other humans, marrying someone, immigrating somewhere, renewing your id, paying your taxes. The immense burden of paperwork and the knowledge required to navigate it all, and the paralysis that comes from just being aware of the burden, is not trivial. The individual really ought to stay in their lane and fit into the template that's expected of them by the systems they are subject to. It legitimately wasn't like this a century ago. We were oppressed by nature (disease, material poverty), but in many real ways we had more freedom of action to just do life stuff.
  - whimsicalism 10mo ago
    Steady state solution? Christ, imagine if they had decided that's where they were at in 1800.
- sapphicsnail 10mo ago
  > Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. There are numerous counterexamples to this and plenty of them worked out fine. The speed and enthusiasm we adopt new technology is unmatched by any culture with a surviving literary tradition that I'm aware of.
FridayoLeary 10mo ago
It's understandable why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god. Some things can be labelled in a different way to make them more palatable. But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual. Which is the same reason i don't like assisted suicide. On the subject of colour blindness, i know many people who are colour blind and it's little more then a minor inconvenience for them. A large portion of the population probably don't even know they are colour blind. It's pretty widespread.
- xvector 10mo ago
  > But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual. This is where you have it wrong. The risk is not to society, it is to the individual. One family can take on immense risk to discover something that benefits all of humanity - whether it makes us live better, cure a disease, etc. Yes, there are society-wide upheavals that a new technology like this might create, which you might be referring to as a "risk" - but upheavals are a fact of life all major technologies throughout human history. We will adapt.
  - FridayoLeary 10mo ago
    It's not a simple debate, but you are suggesting unprecedented levels of medical intervention. It's an ethical minefield. Firstly, i'm sure this is not your intention, but you are basically suggesting we should test genetic experiments on human guinea pigs. I'm not an expert in medical ethics but i'm pretty sure it's a major no go however noble the intention (i know new treatments get tested the whole time but this is a level up from that) . You are also suggesting we should use it to solve problems as trivial as colour blindness, even without fully understanding the moral, ethical and social impacts of using gene editing in such a way.
- inglor_cz 10mo ago
  "It feels too much like playing god." Everything that is on the leading edge of medical science feels like playing god and some people will loudly protest against it, but the next generation will consider the very same thing absolutely normal and expected. IVF was once "playing god". Heart transplants were once "playing god". Resuscitation was once "playing god". Surgeries of inner organs were once "playing god". Vaccination against smallpox was once "playing god".
energy123 10mo ago
This mode of banal cruelty is absolutely everywhere in the law, completely invisible to the majority who don't suffer under its boot.
pessimizer 10mo ago
> "Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!" Nobody requires you to have children. Your problem could just as easily have been infertility. So instead of gambling, you can choose to treat having a genetic disease like being infertile, or you can dabble in eugenics. My "rigid ethics" frowns on eugenics. We have lots of children who have already been born who need help. They may never satisfy your desire to see your (admittedly bad) genetics reflected in the world, but maybe they could give a legacy to your intellect and compassion? Eugenics was once very popular among the middle and upper classes, though, before there were incidents. There's no reason to think that it won't be popular again. I think that society as a whole has to decide how we treat human lives though; your children don't strictly belong to you, they belong to themselves and are protected by the state (even against you.) I'm totally comfortable if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be criminal, or if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be mandatory. I just know where I sit on the issue. And I also know that the places that eugenics survived was in things like dog and cat breeding, and the preferences of people for dogs and cats did not make them healthy, it made them interesting. Ready for the human version of "Twisty Cats"?
- nlitened 10mo ago
  I am confused with your position. On one hand you seem to think that eugenics is bad and wrong, on the other had you have a preference on what people should and should not have children — but isn’t it literally eugenics?
  - pessimizer 10mo ago
    > you have a preference on what people should and should not have children You read something that wasn't in my comment. I said that nobody is forcing anyone to gamble. You can choose to gamble, but nobody is forcing you to.
  - fruitworks 10mo ago
    OP doesn't express a preference, just references GP's preference.
fruitworks 10mo ago
reality is cruel
isodev 10mo ago
> it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these Imagine women going through this extreme painful thing every month and the best we have is generic painkillers and stupid jokes about “the special day”. Do you know people petition their cities to remove traffic light installations for visually impaired people just because they don’t like the clicking noise? It’s a cruel world friend. Unless you get a billionaire to care about your problem, it will take many years until there is interest and consensus to improve the situation.
expedition32 10mo ago
Because we all know how batshit insane and evil American billionaires are.
- LtWorf 10mo ago
  How did your comment get downvoted? Ah yes because this site is populated by batshit insane evil wannabe billionaires.
  - Hammershaft 10mo ago
    It's reductive and inflammatory while adding nothing to the discussion.
mac-mc 10mo ago
I've tried designing information-dense things for colorblind coworkers, and they seemed a bit disinterested in testing it out with me. Even with tools that simulate it, you can still be off, I've found. There can be some sensitivity about trying to figure it out with them. I've added little affordances here and there, and ironically, I rely mentally more on color coding things because I am bad at finding things in a visual field than most. I've also found that colorblind family members and friends just never tell you and they tend to suffer in silence. Even my own half-brother (which I have a 15 year gap with) didn't tell me he was colorblind until recently.
pfisherman 10mo ago
[flagged]
- andriesm 10mo ago
  "for any reason other than to cure a fatal disease" ... what about non-fatal but debilitating ? Sounds like you have a pretty absolutist view here ? What other reasonable exceptions can we imagine outside your rigid criteria ? Why should we not have nuanced discussions of the entire spectrum of reasons ? Also hard to miss your implication of "agree with me or you are on par with a nazi"
  - pfisherman 10mo ago
    What burden of disease are we talking about here? Ask the question would you be comfortable allowing babies to be maimed or killed in a medical experiment to develop a treatment to some malady? Make no mistake that is what we are talking about here. You are testing a therapy. Because you are editing the genome adverse effects of the therapy are irreversible and present at birth. Those adverse effects may include maiming or death. So now that we have established what the stakes are, I ask again, what set of diseases do you think it is worth the risk of maiming and killing babies to develop a cure? I think fatal monogenic diseases could be justifiable. But even there a valid argument could be raised about alternative approaches - ex. Cystic fibrosis. Once you get beyond that things start getting dicey pretty quickly. Only a hop, skip, and a jump to nazi medical experiments on the “mentally retarded”. Check out the Belmont Report for more formalized ethical framework for medical experimentation on people.
- whimsicalism 10mo ago
  Minimizing what the Nazis did is not cool and the suggestion that providing treatment for debilitating diseases to infants is ‘on par’ with murdering six million jews and millions more is honestly gross to me. Keep your rhetoric in check before you start minimizing the Holocaust.
  - pfisherman 10mo ago

xvector 10mo ago

We have become too risk averse as a species to make any real progress on this front. Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. Hunter-gatherers setting off in an unknown direction in search for more abundant pastures, knowing that their survival was unlikely. Everything we have is thanks to them. Today we sit on our laurels, unwilling to take trajectory-changing bets because things might go wrong. In our risk paralysis, human evolution will come to a standstill, and that is a disservice to all future humans. No longer can an individual family or group of humans set out in that direction in search of a better future. They will be thrown in prison for daring to instead.

dsign 10mo ago
I often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?
fruitworks 10mo ago
There aren't any risks to take. Modern society is approaching a steady-state solution. Eugenics and artificial selection results in monocultures. In the long run has the opposite effect of what you're describing.
- xvector 10mo ago
  I think it is fairly shortsighted to think that modern society is approaching "steady state" when we are on the "stick" part of the hockey stick curve of progress. There are plenty of risks to take today (with things like gene editing - which does not mean "monoculture") and there will be plenty of trajectory-changing risks to take tomorrow.
- energy123 10mo ago
  Maybe it's not risk-aversion, but an adjacent concept I'll call stifled freedom of action. It's very hard to just do stuff nowadays. For example, building something on your land, selling stuff to other humans, marrying someone, immigrating somewhere, renewing your id, paying your taxes. The immense burden of paperwork and the knowledge required to navigate it all, and the paralysis that comes from just being aware of the burden, is not trivial. The individual really ought to stay in their lane and fit into the template that's expected of them by the systems they are subject to. It legitimately wasn't like this a century ago. We were oppressed by nature (disease, material poverty), but in many real ways we had more freedom of action to just do life stuff.
- whimsicalism 10mo ago
  Steady state solution? Christ, imagine if they had decided that's where they were at in 1800.
sapphicsnail 10mo ago
> Our ancestors would make the most daring bets in pursuit of a better for their children. There are numerous counterexamples to this and plenty of them worked out fine. The speed and enthusiasm we adopt new technology is unmatched by any culture with a surviving literary tradition that I'm aware of.

FridayoLeary 10mo ago

It's understandable why society would be afraid of doing such things. It feels too much like playing god. Some things can be labelled in a different way to make them more palatable. But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual. Which is the same reason i don't like assisted suicide. On the subject of colour blindness, i know many people who are colour blind and it's little more then a minor inconvenience for them. A large portion of the population probably don't even know they are colour blind. It's pretty widespread.

xvector 10mo ago
> But in this case i feel the wider harm to society outweighs the potential good to the individual. This is where you have it wrong. The risk is not to society, it is to the individual. One family can take on immense risk to discover something that benefits all of humanity - whether it makes us live better, cure a disease, etc. Yes, there are society-wide upheavals that a new technology like this might create, which you might be referring to as a "risk" - but upheavals are a fact of life all major technologies throughout human history. We will adapt.
- FridayoLeary 10mo ago
  It's not a simple debate, but you are suggesting unprecedented levels of medical intervention. It's an ethical minefield. Firstly, i'm sure this is not your intention, but you are basically suggesting we should test genetic experiments on human guinea pigs. I'm not an expert in medical ethics but i'm pretty sure it's a major no go however noble the intention (i know new treatments get tested the whole time but this is a level up from that) . You are also suggesting we should use it to solve problems as trivial as colour blindness, even without fully understanding the moral, ethical and social impacts of using gene editing in such a way.
inglor_cz 10mo ago
"It feels too much like playing god." Everything that is on the leading edge of medical science feels like playing god and some people will loudly protest against it, but the next generation will consider the very same thing absolutely normal and expected. IVF was once "playing god". Heart transplants were once "playing god". Resuscitation was once "playing god". Surgeries of inner organs were once "playing god". Vaccination against smallpox was once "playing god".

energy123 10mo ago

This mode of banal cruelty is absolutely everywhere in the law, completely invisible to the majority who don't suffer under its boot.

pessimizer 10mo ago

> "Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!" Nobody requires you to have children. Your problem could just as easily have been infertility. So instead of gambling, you can choose to treat having a genetic disease like being infertile, or you can dabble in eugenics. My "rigid ethics" frowns on eugenics. We have lots of children who have already been born who need help. They may never satisfy your desire to see your (admittedly bad) genetics reflected in the world, but maybe they could give a legacy to your intellect and compassion? Eugenics was once very popular among the middle and upper classes, though, before there were incidents. There's no reason to think that it won't be popular again. I think that society as a whole has to decide how we treat human lives though; your children don't strictly belong to you, they belong to themselves and are protected by the state (even against you.) I'm totally comfortable if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be criminal, or if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be mandatory. I just know where I sit on the issue. And I also know that the places that eugenics survived was in things like dog and cat breeding, and the preferences of people for dogs and cats did not make them healthy, it made them interesting. Ready for the human version of "Twisty Cats"?

nlitened 10mo ago
I am confused with your position. On one hand you seem to think that eugenics is bad and wrong, on the other had you have a preference on what people should and should not have children — but isn’t it literally eugenics?
- pessimizer 10mo ago
  > you have a preference on what people should and should not have children You read something that wasn't in my comment. I said that nobody is forcing anyone to gamble. You can choose to gamble, but nobody is forcing you to.
- fruitworks 10mo ago
  OP doesn't express a preference, just references GP's preference.

fruitworks 10mo ago

reality is cruel

isodev 10mo ago

> it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these Imagine women going through this extreme painful thing every month and the best we have is generic painkillers and stupid jokes about “the special day”. Do you know people petition their cities to remove traffic light installations for visually impaired people just because they don’t like the clicking noise? It’s a cruel world friend. Unless you get a billionaire to care about your problem, it will take many years until there is interest and consensus to improve the situation.

expedition32 10mo ago

Because we all know how batshit insane and evil American billionaires are.

LtWorf 10mo ago
How did your comment get downvoted? Ah yes because this site is populated by batshit insane evil wannabe billionaires.
- Hammershaft 10mo ago
  It's reductive and inflammatory while adding nothing to the discussion.

mac-mc 10mo ago

I've tried designing information-dense things for colorblind coworkers, and they seemed a bit disinterested in testing it out with me. Even with tools that simulate it, you can still be off, I've found. There can be some sensitivity about trying to figure it out with them. I've added little affordances here and there, and ironically, I rely mentally more on color coding things because I am bad at finding things in a visual field than most. I've also found that colorblind family members and friends just never tell you and they tend to suffer in silence. Even my own half-brother (which I have a 15 year gap with) didn't tell me he was colorblind until recently.

pfisherman 10mo ago

[flagged]

andriesm 10mo ago
"for any reason other than to cure a fatal disease" ... what about non-fatal but debilitating ? Sounds like you have a pretty absolutist view here ? What other reasonable exceptions can we imagine outside your rigid criteria ? Why should we not have nuanced discussions of the entire spectrum of reasons ? Also hard to miss your implication of "agree with me or you are on par with a nazi"
- pfisherman 10mo ago
  What burden of disease are we talking about here? Ask the question would you be comfortable allowing babies to be maimed or killed in a medical experiment to develop a treatment to some malady? Make no mistake that is what we are talking about here. You are testing a therapy. Because you are editing the genome adverse effects of the therapy are irreversible and present at birth. Those adverse effects may include maiming or death. So now that we have established what the stakes are, I ask again, what set of diseases do you think it is worth the risk of maiming and killing babies to develop a cure? I think fatal monogenic diseases could be justifiable. But even there a valid argument could be raised about alternative approaches - ex. Cystic fibrosis. Once you get beyond that things start getting dicey pretty quickly. Only a hop, skip, and a jump to nazi medical experiments on the “mentally retarded”. Check out the Belmont Report for more formalized ethical framework for medical experimentation on people.
whimsicalism 10mo ago
Minimizing what the Nazis did is not cool and the suggestion that providing treatment for debilitating diseases to infants is ‘on par’ with murdering six million jews and millions more is honestly gross to me. Keep your rhetoric in check before you start minimizing the Holocaust.
- pfisherman 10mo ago