This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
While the Sweeney jeans add is clearly an overreaction to fake eugenics downthread, it does seem like real, hard, embryo selection eugenics is here, or at least right around the corner. Scott Alexander's article released yesterday, Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection, says:
The gist of the article is that while the science is still in its infancy and there are a lot of challenges to overcome, these companies are not just selling vaporware. There's real embryo selection based on traits happening, that is going to be significant for babies being born now.
Of course this article is just another confirmation of science fiction becoming reality, but it's still shocking to see from my perspective. You'd think we would at least have a discussion as to whether this should be legal or not, but unfortunately given how crippled out legislative apparatus is, tech companies continue to just push ahead with zero fear of regulatory change. They're willing to take the risk.
Now I personally have religious reasons to oppose this sort of intervention, but even if you don't, it's not hard to imagine the insane societal consequences of allowing free for all designer babies. As one hyperbolic comment on the slate star subreddit says:
While this comment is pretty over the top, I still think there's a strong point here! Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a user's manual. Then again, I suppose the general zeitgeist considers the prole class to be so whipped, and coddled with bread and circuses, that our materialistic transhumanist tech overlords can simply do whatever they want, even if it will end up condemning "natural-born" people to permanent servitude.
The culture war lines here would've been pretty clear a while ago, but now it's muddled. Will the religious right be able to turn their coalition against this? Will the left see this as inequality on steroids? Will an uneasy alliance be made to ban this technology from the light of day? Only time will tell.
We've had screenings for things like Down's Syndrome for a while, and we do not (in general) oppose abortions in those cases. Even countries that ban elective abortions completely tend to allow it in cases of malformation, which Down's Syndrome would count as. And then you just try again. This doesn't seem too different in concept, just a lot easier and more flexible. In this case, too, the only people who don't do this are certain religious people. The genetic material is still coming from the parents, they're not actually making 'designer babies' or superhumans or anything of the sort.
We're not getting Gattaca. The problem there was that they put DNA tests everywhere in their society. That's the dystopian bit. And who would have anything to gain by doing that?
I don't think we are even functional enough as a society. If we're getting a dystopia, we're getting "Brazil". (With perhaps some shades of "Demolition Man".) We kind of already saw this during Covid with the half-working tracking apps and the like. Both in the fact that the government's attempt at oppression frequently hurt random strangers by accident while not even really dealing with the actual dissidents, and in the fact that the general populace mostly just shrugged about it all.
Who would have anything to gain by doing that?
Employers could hire people in the bottom fifth percentile for requiring sick days… and wanting vacations.
Political parties could put forward candidates with high empathy and cooperation scores, as determined by an AI, but with high loyalty to ensure they’d take care of their voters and not have a ton of affairs.
Every sport would become moneyball, even the Olympics.
Forget normal, the big money would go to edge cases. It would be meritocracy by caste.
That's completely orthogonal to embryo selection though. We don't magically gain the tech to accurately scan these things from your DNA.
And even if we had it, and decided to use it, we'd look at people's actual results, and we could do that with naturally born people in the same way. Even if they would in general end up performing worse than people born from selected embryos, you'd still not have Gattaca, even though it would be dystopian in its own way. There's no incentive to start discriminating specifically against natural-born people specifically and checking that everywhere.
We already rank people by their traits and abilities, we just do it in a more fuzzy way. For sports it's the easiest. We have them compete and see who's best. Even if we could perfectly predict this using their DNA, nothing would change.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link