Reported as “not politics” and while I can see that argument, what they’re talking about here has immense political ramifications, going back to Reagan’s racist “welfare queen”.
I haven’t yet read Chan’s book, but I would recommend also reading Aubrey Clayton’s Bernoulli’s Fallacy—which catalogs how the principle founders of eugenics were also the founders of modern statistical methodology, and how they distorted the latter to justify their beliefs.
Please please please forgive my ignorance
Looking at the basic definition of eugenics makes it seem like the sci-fi concept of editing a fetus to not have diseases. Is there something ethically wrong with that?
I know eugenics is based in nazi shit and “selective breeding” (which I’m vehemently against), but people get angry at the term, so I’m assuming we’re nowhere nere the sci-fi stuff(?)
Eugenics is basically selective breeding applied to humans to weed out undesirable traits like diseases or disabilities.
It sounds okay on paper but as history showed us, it is, more often than not, used to justify heinous shit. Especially when you leave it to humans to define “undesirable traits”.
Nazis used it, but so did America, Japan, China, France and many many more.
And now, imagine tech bros from the Valley wanting to engineer the genome and deliver the “perfect” baby to some rich fucks. We’re obviously not there yet, but it’s only a matter of time if we let them.It’s historically been applied at the level of societies rather than individuals, and targeted at common traits seen as undesirable rather than at specific genetic defects. And it tends to be based on misconceptions about evolution—e.g., that an ideal population is one in which all members’ genotypes approach some hypothetical optimum, and any genetic diversity within a population is deleterious.
I see! That makes perfect sense! Thank you
Racists like Musk love it because it’s a way to reduce “unwanted” populations without saying it outright
Good, we’re way behind schedule. The Eugenics Wars were supposed to happen back in the 90s!
