american-jews

"Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus."

""Chesterton's Post" is a call for action: Sometimes we need to intervene just to preserve what we already have. This separation is jarring. Polygenic screening has obvious benefits, like boosting the chance that our children will have healthy and happy lives. But there are also potential costs. The hard part is trying to sort out when skepticism about new technologies like polygenic screening reflects a mere psychological prejudice, such as status quo bias, and when it might be justified. [...] In the realm of reproduction, Chesterton’s fence reminds us that we should be wary of making sweeping changes in the genome without understanding what might go wrong."

"Still, the distinction between embryo selection and gene editing is not as stark as it might seem. Genes mutate all the time; indeed, mutation drives evolution. If random mutations are a constant part of nature, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with altered genes. Eventually, a combination of embryo selection and gene editing may be essential just to stay where we are now. This is because the modern world has been quietly fostering the accumulation of deleterious mutations in all of us. Genetic mutations occur throughout our lives, and some are passed along to our children. Most mutations are either neutral or harmful from the standpoint of fitness. [...] [E]ntropy is a pervasive miasma that leads to disintegration and decay. In the absence of purifying selection, and in the presence of the modern welfare state, which protects us from the ravages of disease and famine and scarcity, we will likely experience a rise in deleterious mutations, along with other genetic pathologies. [...] We may need to keep repairing the post just to preserve the parts of it that we cherish."

"A colleague of mine in the economics department once said, "when the price of bullshit is zero, demand is inelastic." A corollary of this principle is that when the price of bullshit is zero, the supply of bullshit is infinite, especially when there are tangible gains for bullshitters."

"Prometheus was punished for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to people. Fire symbolizes the arts and sciences – the fruits of our cognitive faculties. Although he was sentenced by Zeus to eternal torture for sharing his knowledge, Prometheus is seen by most readers as a hero, and Zeus as a villain."

"The title of this essay is deliberately provocative. Eugenics can be thought of as any attempt to harness the power of reproduction to produce people with traits that enable them to thrive. Nearly everyone agrees that parents should provide an environment that promotes the welfare of their children. Advocates of eugenics add that we should also manipulate biology to promote well-being, provided we can do so without imposing undue risk on our children or on other people with whom they will share the planet."

"I cannot shake the conviction that life is (usually) worth living, and that we should continue to create the conditions for intelligent life to experience beauty, create art, discover how the world works, and continue to set and satisfy goals that presuppose a complex form of intelligence. It is at this point that our intuitions bottom out. If you think that life is pointless, given that we will leave no trace in 20 billion years, it is hard to know how to convince you to believe otherwise. An obligation to reproduce, no matter how weak it is, cannot exist unless there is value to the future experiences intelligent creatures will have."

"Evolution is path-dependent. Future populations will be shaped by the choices parents make now. These choices will be influenced by the social and political institutions they live under. It is up to us to think through what kinds of institutions we should create, and what kinds of future people should exist."

"I was doubtful that there is anything really new and important to say about the topic. I was wrong. By focusing on collective action problems and negative externalities, Anomaly has done a great service."

"Eugenics has become a dirty word in popular culture because of its excesses in the early twentieth century, including forced sterilization laws in the USA and Germany (which were applied to the ‘feebleminded’ but sometimes also to epileptics and even sexual deviants). But a lot of the criticism of eugenics conflates what Galton and many modern academics in bioethics mean by ‘eugenics’ with how the Nazis misused it [...] Moral grandstanding has become so common in connection with the word that journalists often use ‘eugenics’ to mean something like ‘unjust coercion of innocent parents’. But Galton and Darwin would have rejected this, and so should we. According to Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son and past president of the Eugenics Society of England, ‘Eugenics is the study of heredity as it may be applied to the betterment, mental and physical, of the human race’ [...] While people disagree about precisely which traits are worth promoting, what motivates eugenics is a concern that individual welfare depends in part on the average traits of a population, and that demographic trends matter to the extent that they influence the success or failure of entire populations."