On the "self-governing" model, it might be that the blind community would want to disallow propagating blindness, while the deaf community would not disallow it:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4059844/
Judy: And how’s… I mean, I know we’re talking about the blind community now, but in a DEAF (person’s own emphasis) community, some deaf couples are actually disappointed when they have an able bodied… child.
William: I believe that’s right.
Paul: I think the majority are.
Judy: Yes. Because then …
Margaret: Do they?
Judy: Oh, yes! It’s well known down at the deaf centre. So some of them would choose to have a deaf baby! (with an incredulous voice)
Moderator: Actually, a few years ago a couple chose to have a deaf baby.
Margaret: Can’t understand that!
Judy: I’ve never heard of anybody in our blind community talk like that.
Paul: To perpetuate blindness! I don’t know anybody in the blind community who’d want to do that.
you are influencing them at the stage of being an embryo
I'm mainly talking about engineering that happens before the embryo stage.
That's just not a morally coherent distinction, nor is it one the law makes
Of course it's one the law makes. IIUC it's not even illegal for a pregnant woman to drink alcohol.
If you want to start a campaign to legalize the blinding of children, well, we have a free speech clause, you are entitled to do that. Have you considered maybe doing it separately from the genetic engineering thing?
I can't tell if you're strawmanning to make a point, or what, but anyway this makes absolutely no sense.
Whether you do it by genetic engineering or surgically or through some other means is entirely beside the point. Genetic engineering isn't special.
I'm not especially distinguishing the methods, I'm mainly distinguishing whether it's being done to a living person. See my comment upthread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rxcGvPrQsqoCHndwG/the-principle-of-genomic-liberty?commentId=qnafba5dx6gwoFX4a
We get genetic engineering by showing people that it is just another technology, and we can use it to do good and not evil, applying the same notions of good and evil that we would anywhere else.
I think you're fundamentally missing that your notions of good and evil aren't supposed to automatically be made into law. That's not what law is for. See a very similar discussion here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JFWiM7GAKfPaaLkwT/the-vision-of-bill-thurston?commentId=Xvs2y9LWbpFcydTJi
The eugenicists in early 20th century America also believed they were increasing good and getting rid of evil. Do you endorse their policies, and/or their general stance toward public policy?
Any normal person can see that a genetic engineer should be subject to the same ethical and legal constraints there as the surgeon. Arguing otherwise will endanger your purported goal of promoting this technology.
Maybe, I'm not sure and I'd like to know. This is an empirical question that I hope to find out about.
This notion of "erasing a type of person" also seems like exactly the wrong frame for this. When we cured smallpox, did we erase the type of person called "smallpox survivor"? When we feed a hungry person, are we erasing the type of person called "hungry person"? None of this is about erasing anyone. This is about fixing, or at least not intentionally breaking, people.
That's nice that you can feel good about your intentions, but if you fail to listen to the people themselves who you're erasing, you're the one who's being evil. When it comes to their own children, it's up to them, not you. If you ask people with smallpox "is this a special consciousness, a way of life or being, which you would be sad to see disappear from the world?", they're not gonna say "hell yeah!". But if you ask blind people or autistic people, some fraction of them will say "hell yeah!". Your attitude of just going off your own judgement... I don't know what to say about it yet, I'm not even empathizing with it yet. (If you happen to have a link to a defense of it, e.g. by a philosopher or other writer, I'd be curious.)
Now, as I've suggested in several places, if the blind children whose blind parents chose to make them blind later grow and say "This was terrible, it should not have happened, the state should not allow this", THEN I'd be likely to support regulation to that effect.
i think i'm in the wrong universe, can someone at tech support reboot the servers or something? it's not reasonable for you to screw up something as simple as putting paying customers in the right simulation . and then you're like "here's some picolightcones". if you actually cared it would be micro or at least nano
Yeah, cognitive diversity is one of those aspects that could be subject to some collapse. Anomaly et al.[1] discuss this, though ultimately suggest regulatory parsimony, which I'd take even further and enshrine as a right to genomic liberty.
I feel only sort-of worried about this, though. There's a few reasons (note: this is a biased list where I only list reasons I'm less worried; a better treatment would make the opposite case too, think about bad outcomes, investigate determinative facts, and then make judgements, etc.):
It would be interesting to poll parents to see what sorts of considerations they might take into account, and decisions they might make. One could also ask embryo screening companies.
Anomaly, Jonathan, Christopher Gyngell, and Julian Savulescu. ‘Great Minds Think Different: Preserving Cognitive Diversity in an Age of Gene Editing’. Bioethics 34, no. 1 (January 2020): 81–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12585. ↩︎
So I guess one direction this line of thinking could go is how we can get the society-level benefits of a cognitive diversity of minds without necessarily having cognitively-uneven kids grow up in pain.
Absolutely, yeah. A sort of drop-dead basic thing, which I suppose is hard to implement for some reason, is just not putting so much pressure on kids--or more precisely, not acting as though everything ought to be easy for every kid. Better would be skill at teaching individual kids by paying attention to the individual's shape of cognition. That's difficult because it's labor-intensive and requires open-mindedness. I don't know anything about the economics of education and education reform, but yeah, it would be good to fix this... AI tutors could probably improve over the status quo in many cases, but would lack some important longer-term adaptation (like, actually learning how the kid thinks and what ze can and can't easily do).
IDK what to say... I guess I'm glad you're not in charge? @JuliaHP I've updated a little bit that AGI aligned to one person would be bad in practice lol.
On second/third thought, I think you're making a good point, though also I think you're missing a different important point. And I'm not sure what the right answers are. Thanks for your engagement... If you'd be interested in thinking through this stuff in a more exploratory way on a recorded call to be maybe published, hopefully I'll be set up for that in a week or two, LMK.