Why would it? Don't we have enough smart people? Smarts come at a cost. Its usually tied with anxiety disorders, neuroticism, poor ability to develop social skills, limited emotional expression, lack of empathy, autism, etc.
We are also discounting things like emotional intelligence and other types of intelligences we may not fully understand yet or even recognize!
I'm not sure if the world needs a bunch of cold and emotionally stunted people taking the place of more well-rounded people. I think its questionable to think evolution didn't account for the diversity of personality types needed for a successful human society. Claiming "This type one here, this is the only good one, so we'll make everyone like this," seems foolish if not disastrous. Personally, I'd gladly shave off more than a few IQ points to be more empathic and social.
Not to mention, society already tried this with eugenics fairly recently. Its not "smart" to repeat the mistakes of history.
>Not to mention, society already tried this with eugenics fairly recently. Its not "smart" to repeat the mistakes of history.
When did we "try this" with eugenics "fairly recently"?
I'm almost certain you're referring to Nazism. But was Hitler really killing all the Jews for some sort of eugenics experiment? No, I don't think so. Were his actions genuinely scientific at all? Nope. He believed that raw power conquered all and that anyone weak should be murdered. That's different than eugenics.
We need to get past this kneejerk reaction comparing doing anything beneficial within the human genome to Nazi eugenics. It's a completely absurd comparison, especially considering that the average intelligence of Jews is very high.
Hitler was evil because he was a mass murderer, it's as simple as that. I really shouldn't have to clarify this on YC of all places.
No Eugenics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
It seems "smart people" need to start reading some history books.
Its complicated to nation-build. Any that work now, do so because of competition and selection. Remove that with 'intelligent design' and all adaptation stops. Fitness plummets.
I'm thinking more along the lines of attenuating certain (hypothetical) genetic contributors to antisocial personality disorder, violent psychosis, etc.
Not engineering docile perfection, just less of the obviously really bad stuff.
Edit: I do share your concerns about stopping Darwinian selection, though. Choosing local optima for cooperation might come back to bite us in the coming TransNeptunian War of 2217, e.g., when psychopathic, ruthless strategy is all that saves the human race from the conflict of first alien contact.
If we don't achieve a technological singularity in the next couple decades, I doubt that an alien invasion will be a worry a couple centuries from now. I say this because of impending ecological collapse, which will end human civilization as we know it... if not humanity in total.
And I'll save for another time a rant about how expensive it is for anything to cross interstellar distances. At most we'll see a self-replicating probe that tries to subsume all matter in the solar system, the "invaders" won't physically travel here.
And even as software, I predict that new colonists would likely arrive by communications laser, well after the local infrastructure has been built. Why bother coming over during the boring building phase?
lol, that's a great line.
While you may be right that our current genetic state, attained through generations of ruthless competition and selective pressures, is optimal for some things, it is harmful for others. Notably, the health of biosphere and many millions/billions of other humans. What good does nation-building do if our actions destroy each other through war or create an ecosystem unable to sustain advanced life? I would rather engineer for increased prosocial behavior and take our chances down that route than where we are headed now.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2741266_cod...
- You can be bad (i.e., lack of consequences)
- You want to be bad (i.e., some sort of reinforcement, often $).
Now both of these are de facto there if you become a high level politician and that's IMO the reason for real world outcomes [...] decidedly not good
Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle.
Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time.
Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries.
This is too complex of a concept to limit it to two coinciding factors, IMO we are all all of these things in differing quantities.
Hopefully people learn that the consequences of bad actions are rarely beneficial long term and develop processes to mitigate.
So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it.
> Some people are bad and don't want to be and it is a struggle.
Sure, but that's almost exclusively due to mental illness, not "rationality".
> Some people just do what they need to to survive, for whatever survival means to them at any given time.
Survival is reinforcement.
> Some people test the limits of their, and societal, boundaries.
Mostly because closer to the limit means more reinforcement. Simple risk/reward.
I want to think that being good is non-religiously rewarded (ie. in this life), but I'm not entirely sure that's true. I think it takes effort not to take unethical shortcuts or make profitable but hurtful decisions.
> So you say. I'm much more inclined to believe they believe they'll get away with it.
Says Dylann Roof (convicted of mass shootings at a church in South Carolina), "I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry."
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=heritability+of+moral+s...
The idea that intelligence produces rationality is a myth.
But it'd be pretty strange that IQ would not correlate with real world adaptation efficiency. After all, intelligence is useless if you can't use it to better navigate the world, because it itself misleads you (then you are better off with just fight-or-flight instincts).
And probably tendency for rationality has a genetic component too.
I want to make the world better but it's a bad use of my time from an individual perspective.
The biggest issue with better ethics is that we can't define them, so we couldn't optimize for them. Nobody agrees on what a good person is because nobody agrees on the meaning of good. But meanwhile the real world outcomes are decidedly not good.