Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics? It has deeply immoral roots and has led to some of the most messed up scenarios in our history, but it is also a crazy powerful tool we have been unable to leverage in a non-evil way.

(This is kinda tangential but related) I have a weird theory about humanities purpose: Assuming someone/thing created life (if life wasn't created then it truly is random chaos and we have no purpose), but if life was intentionally made then we were created for a reason. Determining what that reason was will tell us what our purpose is. The only clue we have is evolution. If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution it should give us clues about why we are here. What is evolution driving us to become? If we can figure that out we might be able to deduce what our purpose is.

I feel like one of life's huge leaps forward, on par with single->multicellular, is recognizing that these evolutionary mechanisms exist, furthering our understanding of and leveraging them. Anyway that is a long ramble to say it sucks that we as a species cannot really touch any kind of eugenics without genociding eachother.

>Do you think we will ever turn back to eugenics?

As the word is currently used, no, but mostly because it’s seemingly used to represent, in the public consciousness

> intentional genetic control we dislike

When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like.

I expect many, many more “genetic controls we like” as medical and biological sciences advance, I think “eugenics” will always be viewed as a dead end.

[1] https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/womens-health/201...

> When we do things such as “screening for down syndrome” [1], we are already actively engaged in a eugenics project, but we don’t think of it as one because it’s the kind of intentional genetic control we like.

Historically, many cases of "eugenics" involved a lack of informed consent, even blatant coercion. That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no", and I know couples who have (due to moral objections grounded in their religious beliefs). That's a very big difference.

> That screening is entirely voluntary–you have the right to say "no"

The child doesn't, though, and, if you'll excuse my frankness, I think the abortion affects his/her future the most out of all the parties involved.

If you'll excuse my frankness, at the point of screening it's much more an idea of a child, than an actual he/she.

I see what you're saying, and appreciate you sharing that perspective.

We could say that before conception, everyone agrees there is no child, and at birth, everyone agrees there is a child, so there is maybe a "spectrum" between "idea of a child" and "an actual he/she".

Your use of the wording "much more" sort of supports this "probability distribution function" idea of what a child is, and it seems like a helpful philosophical framing of this difficult and important question.

What I would say, though, is that if society is going to pick a point along that spectrum to base policy decisions on, then there is an imbalance between the risks of placing that point too early versus too late.

Too early means that some women's decisions will be unreasonably restricted, whereas too late means that some human being's lives will be unreasonably terminated.

The philosophically humble thing to do under such uncertainty would therefore be to err on the side of an earlier point, and in fact the earliest point possible, lest future generations look back on us like the slave owners or eugenicists of previous centuries.

Yes this! Eugenics is only when someone else decides it for you.

I think this is exactly the kind of revisionist history Faro's post was talking about. "that was eugenics, this is NUgenics"

Lack of informed consent was never central to eugenics

it's not encoded in law, but we do have a society where who can have many children is determined by economic factors that are not fully under ones control.

lack of economic ability is not the same as someone forcing you not to have children. And you can still have children even when facing economic hardship - lots of people have done it (think immigrant families who start out poor). I would also claim that a lot of western nations subsidize families already, so economic factors is not considered eugenics imho.

How would you feel about a free test for $genetic_marker coupled with taxes for parents that have children with $genetic_marker? Surely that would count as "forced"?

GP said that we do have a society right now where economics is a eugenic factor. Please name one instance of the pattern you described in society today. I'm not aware of any tax on generic markers.

In practically any country with socialized healthcare you will be strongly encouraged to terminate a child that might turn out unhealthy, and in a lot of them you will lose "benefits" (on which you depend because you were forced to pay mandatory social insurance before, taking away your ability to save/invest by yourself) if you don't listen/go to the doctors as "you are supposed to because that's the system". Where I live in Central Europe, going to the gynecologist and listening to their recommendations is a requirement to get full parental social benefits - and the policy most certainly is also based on what's economical for the state/"the system", and only parents that were previously working can get the benefits.

Additionally, you will have to pay the full price for any treatment that's outside their recommendations, this often turns out higher in absolute prices than in any US hospital - even though the people are much poorer.

Then once an unhealthy child is born they often don't get the full benefits of socialized healthcare as they should according to the constitutions, the administration will say "the system works in a different way and you went outside it, so you need to take care of it yourself" and the parents are forced to pay for treatments and medical equipment by themselves because what "the system recommends" is not nearly enough (we are talking about US$ millions of additional out-of-pocket expenses in some real world cases that I follow locally). That could be interpreted as a form of tax too, especially since you are forced to pay mandatory health insurance in most of these countries.

Let me tell you what our purpose is: consciousness. It's to have good conscious experiences.

I think we'll soon achieve a pretty good understanding of meaning that we haven't acknowledge in a long time. I think philosophy has been misleading us into thinking purpose/meaning/motivation is not philosophically tractable. But once you acknowledge it's a property of consciousness (which I think is understandable to be a new insight, given we have finally come to terms with being amazing neural machines ourselves), I think it's a matter of studying information and neural experiences, together with a broader view (of survival, sustainability, and ethics) to have a pretty good idea of what it means to have a good life.

My current hypothesis is as follows: (1) Richness/Depth of experience; (2) Some kind of notion of beauty; (3) A well-functioning motivation system (which we associate with 'happiness'/'satisfaction'/etc. (4) Sustainability and ethics: ensuring all sentient beings through time and space share this wealth.

I hope we can approach a formal theory of ethics and meaning soon. I hope to form a community around discussing and organizing this knowledge (I am notoriously bad with promises though, so if anyone can please help, and join in). Imagine we had a "Super Declaration of [Lifeform] Human Rights", nearly-universally accepted, to guide us! (I think Effective Altruism is a nice step in this direction)

> If we can reverse engineer the mechanisms of evolution

Evolution is a very simple process, broadly speaking. You can implement your own model of it fairly easily. Survival is basically the only driving force, only those variations that survive to reproduce will be present in the next generation. It's a useful tool but we shouldn't let it guide us since it is quite blind.

> What is evolution driving us to become?

There is no destination for the evolutionary process. It's creation by subtraction really, everything that doesn't work gets eliminated. Mind you, it's always only applicable to the current circumstances. What works in one time and place will not always work in another. Hence the constant change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm

This is one of the wildest things I’ve read on the internet… this year?

Why does a lack of creative design mean human experience is meaningless?

Haha thanks

Well a lack of a creator means we invent our own purpose I suppose, and garner whatever ethereal meaning from that we can.

That just feels hollow to me. The idea that we are just biological machines serving the unfathomable aims of some sky daddy is unsettling but suits me better than our purpose being a bunch of lame platitudes about being kind or whatever.

but then sky daddy is the biological machine inventing his own purpose.

Agree, thank you for being first to say it.

That humanity is _converging_ on some "intentional" optimal outcome is dramatically depressing to me in a way that i wasn't prepared to read today.

Now i don't know what's left or right, but insofar as my time here is concerned, let chaos blossom! Way more fun

I think we are like fish in a pond, we don't have the cognitive tools to understand complex enough ideas to determine our 'purpose.' Seen in this way, 'purpose' is simply a symbol that represents another cognition, so asking the question 'what is our purpose?' is essentially meaningless (like a circular definition). I have been influenced a lot by Taoism and Zen Buddhism in particular, where the focus is less on answers to questions, but contemplating the phenomena of the questions themselves.

You're absolutely right - purpose does presuppose another cognition. The good thing is that if we have purpose then there's Someone out there who created us with a purpose. And if that someone wanted us to know what it was, they could tell us in many ways (including by leaving us with a desire for something so innate that we can't substitute anything else for it).

I used to follow this logic but I think it is limited by the fact that using desire as a guide for meaning is a cognition that can be overruled by other congitions. E.g. a religious person may decide to forego actions related to sexual desire because their philosophy follows some theology with rules on sexuality. You could argue that the religious devotion is just a more fundamental desire, but I think this leads to a circular definition ("meaning is derived from our fundamental desires" and "fundamental desires are what we find meaningful").

Instead, "what is the meaning of life" can be interpreted as a question with no cognitive answer, and thus in itself meaningless to ask. The question must then be "what is my meaning in life?" which is up to each person to decide.

Another question: if we desire something, how do we know that _someone_ gave us that desire? And who gave them the desire to give us that particular desire? I think it's turtles all the way down (but I'm not philosopher so would be keen to hear a rebuttal)

I'm with Aristotle - "all men desire happiness". Nothing else is desired for its own sake, but always for the sake of "happiness".

That said, I don't think that knowing that happiness is what we desire tells us very much. We need to go deeper or wider and learn more about the world and ourselves in order to answer the question "in what does our happiness consist". In other words, we need to examine what we have received (since the world and even our selves are experienced as a gift).

Which, coincidentally, is one of the ways that we can intuit that someone gave us what we have - because the principle of sufficient reason says that "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it" and we are an effect. "If I am a gift receiver, there must be a gift giver, and as their gift is great they must be greater still to be able to give so much away".

I agree on the importance of exploration and introspection to find meaning.

However, your interpretation of existence as a 'gift' is simply your own cognition, unrelated to the reality of experience. The tail is wagging the dog here. The duality of giving and receiving are just two linked concepts. If 'you' didn't create the universe, 'someone' must have! But then who made them? The buck has to stop somewhere, or maybe it doesn't exist.

That's right, the buck _has_ to stop somewhere. What else might we discover about this uncaused cause?

In my opinion the issue with the balance here is that no matter where you fall on the "climate scale belief" (except probably the most extreme of deniers), people consider anyone that thinks a better future than you is coming will be labelled a denier, while anyone who thinks a worse future than you think is coming is given a soft pass as just having stronger convictions. That unfortunately leaves the vast majority of people being labelled as deniers from people with stronger beliefs, no matter where you fall.

I think the vast majority of people today do know that climate change is coming, that we are changing the weather at a global scale, etc. Actual true deniers that say human have no effect in global climate, IMHO, are so few that they are not even worth mentioning besides anecdote (at a similar level to flat-earth believers).

The issue then becomes, what level of climate change vs what level of sacrifice are we willing to accept? It seems clear that even with this question there are extremes that are likely unwanted, and there's probably another distribution going from two extremes: do absolutely nothing now and people will die later due to climate change, and the other extreme is sacrificing the prosperity of developed and developing countries now (which means people will continue dying at a rate too high) and have a minimal climate change effect later.

Both extremes are too extreme and seem wrong, and somewhere in the middle seems like the obvious, correct solution, but where exactly in the middle is the important question that not many people seem to be talking about and baffles me.

The problem is that _any_ action is criticized as sacrificing prosperity, even though it often just sacrifices the prosperity of a small number of people.

That small group of people is in fact connected to the rest of the world's population by a chain of progress that eventually leads everyone through the same level of prosperity. By turning the head and thus the direction of progress downwards you are committing the rest of the population to at the very least never achieving any level of prosperity greater than that. In the middle you're dooming them to stagnation at their current level and at the worst you're causing all of us to regress to a lower level of prosperity AND an increase in our impact on the climate due to the inefficiencies that come along with that.

Suppose we were in 1890 discussing how we need to get rid of horse manure in our cities and there were a hot debate on how this "horseless carriage" thing is highly experimental and threatens the livelihood of a whole supply chain around horses. As it turns out, you can get rid of manure and it does in fact make a lot of people poorer, but in the end it enables a lot more prosperity for future generations.

The big difference here is that horses were nearly exclusively used for transportation. Fossil fuels currently provide something like 80% of all the energy used. So if you want your analogy to be accurate then you'd have to be back in 1890 saying "Ok, we're going to get rid of horses AND fossil fuels".

Personally, I do think that burning oil derivatives is a waste and I would like to see it replaced where possible with a superior energy source but the only source that fits the bill for me is nuclear and the only responsible way to do it is to build the new power plants first and then phase out the old fossil fuel plants.

So we should pay now to have nuclear power in the future? Impossible, this lowers our prosperity! /s

Investment is not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice means to destroy something for the sake of something else. When you say we should sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the good of the many (paraphrasing, this is what I interpreted your original comment to mean) then that implies we permanently reduce the prosperity of some group of people. Spending money to build more nuclear power plants is instead a productive use of that time/effort/money that will return on that investment if not with dividends from the sale of the power then with increased productivity and economic output made possible by a larger energy supply.

We know that nuclear power works, it's capable of producing massive amounts of electricity and powering whole countries anywhere we are able to build plants, output doesn't vary based on forces that are outside of our control, uranium is abundant and there are hundreds of years of estimated reserves in the ground. That is a plain and simple case for it to be a bridge to a future where we can produce excess and uninterrupted power using solar, preferably space based arrays that don't use up land, won't be affected by weather and produce power at night. Even better, it might be a bridge to fusion power, having more nuclear physicists and technicians around would surely speed up progress.

I'm averse to reducing prosperity for anyone because it has a very non-zero chance of us never recovering to a position where we can continue to increase prosperity for all. Put plainly, creating energy poverty in the West has a good chance of knocking us into a dark age where little to no progress is made and even regression may happen which, to your concern, would increase CO2 output and worsen climatic effects.

That doesn't seem like a problem - that seems like a feature. Maybe "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" just stuck with me, but a just society doesn't sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the "greater good".

"Justice" is difficult enough to define that many books have been written about the topic. Personally I don't find it just to let a small number of individuals transfer wealth from future generations to their current self.

> but a just society doesn't sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the "greater good".

We fought a war to end slavery. A small number of prosperous people were severely inconvenienced by society enacting that greater good.

That's the problem of democracy - if it's only those who have to sacrifice who are voting in that particular governing entity, it's never ever going to pass.

> Actual true deniers that say human have no effect in global climate, IMHO, are so few that they are not even worth mentioning.

I'm not sure this is true, but even if it is, I think it's only become true recently.

It's getting harder to deny climate change lately because it's more obvious every year that the climate is changing. It's noticeably hotter and drier in the UK every year than it used to be. Hell, I'm standing at a bus stop as I write this at 9am and I'm only wearing a light jacket. I'm pretty sure that would be unusually warm for a September morning ten years ago, but the whole month has been like this in 2022.

I don't hear people saying "climate change isn't happening" much anymore - the more common sentiment now seems to be a shrug. "It can't be that bad, can it? Or at least the really bad stuff won't happen until at least a few decades after I'm dead? I'm sure we'll figure something out - technology keeps getting better so humans will probably solve this problem. And anyway there's not like I can do anything about it personally so I might as well just enjoy the weather." That's the prevailing attitude now, I think.

Yes, I believe it's a fairly recent change! I would think there were many more actual deniers 10-20 years ago, but today it seems we label people as deniers much easier (as you say "it can't be that bad" would be labelled as a denier today).

The choice isn't even starting from the middle of the spectrum. We already have the foot on the accelerator, and it's unlikely we'll let up with our current generation of leaders. I think we'll continue to pollute at a rate far too great for the planet to handle, and we're going to have to get very good at remediation to continue living here.

It will only be once the next generation of leaders comes into power, maybe even the generation after that, as they will be living the climate reality enough to want to fix it (whichever level of severity it ends up being). At which point we'll be needing to focus on remediation still, before finally, hopefully, creating some kind of sustainable version of our current societies.

>I think we'll continue to pollute at a rate far too great for the planet to handle, and we're going to have to get very good at remediation to continue living here.

The planet will do fine, but even stating such a thing is still commit anthropomorphism. The planet will continue to exist for a long time, no matter what the fate of mankind will be.

Even life is most likely to continue prospering in a way or in an other.

We, the human species, are not the planet. Let’s stop to use formulation like "the planet is in danger". No it’s not. The biosphere already went through five major extinction, and life is still there.

The rocks will be ecstatic to hear this news.

Humans aren't the only species evolved to live in this particular climate, and we won't be the only species impacted by an extreme outcome of climate change. Long term, of course, the planet will survive, and hopefully many species will thrive in our absence. But many will go extinct, and it will have been our fault. On a long enough time scale, sure, nothing matters really, the sun will explode and all our flyer campagins will have been for nothing. But we experience a much smaller timescale, and it'd be great if we gave some thought to not boiling the reefs and setting fire to the koalas while we're here.

When people worry about nuclear war, do you also console them that the cockroaches will likely live on?

You're absolutely right, the planet is in no danger. It's us humans that are in danger. We are polluting at a rate far too great for us humans to handle, and if we want to survive as a species we must do something about that.

Even that is gross hyperbole. Humans as species could survive even the most disastrous predictions, rendering entire continents uninhabited.

The top level post is correct. It is a matter of minimizing suffering.

Which will have to be through remediation... I never said the world was coming to an end. I said we aren't likely to stop polluting, so we should get really good at remediating what we will have wrought.

Sure, it would be a good idea to do something. I'm just calling out "if we want to survive as a species we must do something about that“ as hyperbolic. This is a point made in thread you are responding in

There's a big overlap here with COVID thinking. At the end of the day, people are OK with other people dying. And really, how could we not be? It happens every day. Particularly when the hardest hit people will be in other (poorer) countries, it just feels less meaningful to those who will likely fare better.

Yes, unfortunately for as harsh as it sounds for anything at human-scale that inherently has some live-threatening risk, the ideal design is pretty much never 0-deaths. Anything I can think of: driving cars, sports, almost any job, etc. would need massive restrictions, to the point of those actions not making sense anymore, to reduce death risk to 0. So while sure, trying to reduce unnecessary risk, there's always a minimal amount of risk we are okay with.

I don't see de-growth as an extreme option, in fact it is the only outcome possible in the long term, either in a planned manner, or through collapse.

In terms of denialists, I am afraid that actually the majority of people are overwhelmed by the huge issues we are facing, and just think we should enjoy life and forget about any responsibility.

I don't want to lose hope, but as things are now, I am afraid that we are far more likely to face collapse than to find a solution.

What do we mean with de-growth here? Human world population? Energy-consumption per human? long-lasting-non-recyclable-waste per human? Mankind GDP? Wealth distribution discrepancy?

On collapse, the only serious book I red was Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed".

I mean mostly GDP (yes economists, I am looking at you), but, alas, all these dimensions are linked.

I guess that decoupling is possible to some extent. I don't want to lose the hope that we can live happy lives without destroying the planet (or ourselves), but we need a very bold strategy, and I haven't seen any yet.

GDP is not something that happens in an economist's office.

This is another issue witha clear age divide.

Younger generation is overwhelmingly aware of the problem, but our decisiojn makers have an average age of 70 or some such. Older voters hold more power too. Brexit was overwhelmingly voted for by older people.

The west is in crisis because the young peiple are getting shafted at every step, from the housing market to the environment.

I love my grandparents, but I would never put them in a position of power - they just aren't as sharp and switched on as they used to be

Edit: for people downvoting, look at how age of politicians has increased in US. Look at how politics has become more disfunctional. The change is real

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/06/congre...

Also when they were young there was just roughly half the people on this planet comparing to today and even fewer enjoying a western standard of living.

I remember when the Chinese were known for cycling to work en masse. Now they're the largest automobile market in the world.

Old people can't imagine what it's like to grow up in such a world.

Sorry I am commenting in a hurry, but I just have to say... Our way of living - is not a desirable standard. Your mileage may vary, you may be "making it" - but most people aren't. We find reasons to be thankful, but most people are lonely, insecure, unfulfilled and comforting with junk food or media, 'retail therapy' or drugs. Most adults are 'feeling their age', unfit or overweight, medicating. Surrounded by and even consuming materials untested by natural history, that may be contributing to rises in autoimmune and cancer. Some goods are in relative abundance, but also overall as many ills.