Foul - Post Deletions don't count:

http://www.mudbytes.net/log.jpg

Edited: Dropped the inline image. Just click the link.

modgets don't count anyway. QQ

Samson broke the formatting of the board. I demand this injustice be corrected immediately.

Edit: :P

Well if by "modgets" you mean deleting your prior post to pull the count back, we agree :)

What's your preferred solution? The Brave New World approach where varying degress of intellectual retardation are deliberately induced so as to ensure that everyone is exactly stupid enough to be happy with his allotted job? That's pretty cold. Even if the retardation is introduced by "natural" rather than "artificial" processes, it seems unnecessarily cruel if there's another option. It's not exactly impossible for someone of great intellect to take pleasure in manual work.

I have some difficulty keeping a straight face when somebody who proposes that people not even be given the chance to be born and be productive tells somebody else that their solution is "cold".

It is inevitable that the vast majority of potential people will not be born. Countless billions of potential people will not be born for every one that is, no matter what we do. The only question is whether the choice of which person out of the countless billions gets to be born is something that should be left to blind chance, or whether we should be slightly more selective.

That is a very different proposition from deliberately inflicting mental retardation on a real, existing person.

Surely you understand that there is a significant moral difference between damaging (or discriminating against) people who exist and "discriminating against" people who don't exist?

Correction, he is calling the solution he suggests himself as cold, since I never suggested that solution..




So, unless you are super intelligent, you are retarded?

And no, it is not impossible at all for someone of great intellect to take pleasure in manual work, but, being able to do work that uses that intellect is very often more satisfying, and it is often quite frustrating to not be able to use the intellect you have. If you want to call things cruel, how about impossing great intelligence on people to then tell them they can't use it?

The things you have been suggesting don't qualify as 'slightly more selective'.



Those are your own dramatized words. Noone suggested doing that.



So, you argue it is ok to discriminate against people with regards to the right to procreate, and yet you try to accuse others of discriminating?

Am I to take you serious at all here?

From my own experience the biggest draw back of simple manual work is the stupid co-workers and the slightly less stupid managers. This creates an anti-intellectual environment, because intelligence can be, and is in fact, applied everywhere.

It is indeed a bit cold to suggest that there should always be a stupid, criminal, and otherwise undesired underclass because the smart upper class shouldn't be doing the dirty work.

Discrimination is inevitable, but there's no need for pointless discrimination. For example giving stupid people a beating is cruel and stupid, not letting stupid people breed other stupid people is benevolent and smart.

As has been pointed out, you in fact discriminate, and it's a perpetual kind of discrimination that doesn't serve a higher cause other than itself. Not to mention that liberal eugenics doesn't involve discrimination.

So, not having a very high IQ qualifies as stupid, criminal and undesired?

And any non intellectual work is 'dirty' ?

I think intelligence as you view it is overrated.



As has been pointed out, Shasarak stated what he believed to be my solution and pointed out that would be discriminating. Now, you can argue about if it would be, but since I never said what he suggests I said, that is all pretty silly.

Any program where someone other then the person in question gets to decide on someone elses right to procreate will result in discrimination, whatever label you stick on it doesn't matter for that.

That you happen to believe this to be for a good cause is irrelevant, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

!200 :(

You have two choices:

1) People not-yet-born end up with higher intelligence than is typical today.

2) You actively prevent these not-yet-born people from achieving their full potential by insisting on maintaining the indiscriminate genetic status quo.

You have opted for the second choice, which means you are consciously, deliberately lowering the intelligence of future humanity. So, yeah: that is exactly what you are suggesting.

You justify this appalling choice by suggesting that deliberately making a person stupid will actually make him or her happier unless there is "intelligent" work for them to do. I'm afraid I cannot agree with that assessment, and your attitude disgusts me.


It is a given that the desires of the individual must, at some point, become subordinate to the rights of the majority population. A person may be happy committing serial murder, and become less happy if he is prevented from doing so; but his happiness in this instance is less important than the reduction in happiness of the people he kills and maims and of their loved ones. Hence, the state intervenes and makes him unhappy for the common good. This is clearly the correct decision.

Not even you would try to argue that the happiness of the few should always be regarded as more important than the happiness of the many. The only question is where you draw the line. So yes, there is a kind of discrimination in that certain people may not be able to have children without going through an embryo screening process, but that, IMO, is a price worth paying for the enormous benefit to happiness and productivity that it generates.

But if we have people genetically engineered to be happy with menial jobs, and all jobs for that matter, that would make them happy (by definition) and therefore productive (as happier people tend to be more productive) – so maybe it's not so cold after all… after all, it's all in the name of the greater happiness, which seems to be your rationale here!

You make a utilitarian argument, but utilitarianism is plagued by precisely this kind of issue: what exactly the "sum of happiness" means. I think you're making a lot of implicit assumptions without justifying those assumptions. For example, you seem to be arguing that we should maximize happiness as an average of some kind, as opposed to maximizing the total number of "happy points". These are of course two completely different things. Or maybe you're not arguing that; as you haven't made it explicit it's hard to say.

I think that you make good points most of the time, but you sometimes conveniently set aside the logical conclusions of some of the things you say while dismissing them, and have not justified some of the assumptions at the core of your evaluation metrics. It is these occasional thorny issues that make it very hard in my opinion to subscribe to your argument as presented thus far.

This is where genetic egalitarianism comes into play. Like some strife for social equality by means of environmental influences, a hereditarian believes that this is impossible. As Shasarak pointed out, the only way to achieve this is by making smarter people more stupid, and I don't think anyone agrees that everyone on this forum with an IQ above 115 should be punched in the head until they do.

So from a hereditarian viewpoint eugenics is the only way to achieve social equality, since a hereditarian sees social inequality as to be primarily caused by genetic inequality. And as studied in "IQ, and the wealth of nations", populations with higher average IQ have more wealth, and arguably, subsequently a higher rate of happiness.

This is where the distinctions between an 'egalitarian' and a 'bio-egalitarian' comes into play. A hereditarian can very much be an egalitarian, and as such hereditarianism doesn't automatically lead to racist attitudes as seen on sites like stormfront.

Next there is the evolutionary argument, that mankind is more likely to colonize space if the average intelligence was to double. Space colonization is an issue advocated by Hawkings.

I don't know about you, but my IQ is 156, and I type at 106 wpm with 99.2% accuracy.

(I couldn't think of a more serious thing to say in response to you, sorry, since you still seem mostly interested in talking in your vacuum without engaging in good-faith debate.)

A number of bad assumptions here:

- You present option 1 as fact, but you cannot accurately predict the outcome of your meddling with a chaotic system, even less so when dealing with multiple interacting chaotic systems, hence you have no idea if your program would actually give the desired results, and what the consequences would be. Everything about restricting the gene pool has already been said, and applies here as well.

- Even if everyone had a much higher IQ then is typical today, that doesn't help anyone achieving his or her full potential, in fact it does the opposite, it makes it more difficult. Note that this is not a judgement, I don't think this is a bad thing, but it is a mistake in your reasoning.

- I don't suggest doing anything actively, hence your second option is nonsense.

- people not yet born do not have any potential yet.

I am saying that a centralized program to try to achieve higher intelligence by means of eugenics is a bad idea, and that noone has any business telling someone else that they can or can't procreate.

<some stuff skipped because it is based on the above bad assumptions>



That is the same reasoning as used often to justify serfdom, yes, it is tru, but not when that infringes the rights of that minority.



Completely irrelevant analogy. If you want it to be relevant, then you first have to prove that an individual not possessing a high intellect is a similar problem for society as a serial killer.



You somewhere clearly missed that point that if we all would have been happy from the start we'd still have been sitting in trees eating bananas.

And, obviously, you are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitiled to put words in someone elses mouth, so stop trying to talk for me.

Once upon a time, the word "discriminate" was defined as:

1. To make a clear distinction; distinguish: discriminate among the options available.
2. To make sensible decisions; judge wisely.

As in, "He was a man of discriminating taste, and enjoyed fine wine and good cigars."

Since the Civil Rights movement co-opted it in the '50s, it has come to be an emotionally laden term implying prejudice. It's hard to have a fair discussion when your brain is awash with chemicals. Consider the following:

aidil said:

"Any program where someone other then the person in question gets to decide on someone elses right to procreate will result in discrimination, whatever label you stick on it doesn't matter for that."

as opposed to:

"Any program where someone other then the person in question gets to decide on someone else's right to procreate will result in sensible decisions, whatever label you stick on it doesn't matter for that."

It should be obvious that prospective parents have an emotional bias as well as a financial bias if they're on welfare, and doctors have a very strong financial bias. Who, then, is capable of making a sensible decision? Or should we leave it to chance and have a lottery?

Lol. Once upon a time a lot of words meant something different. Here's the modern definition for the word discriminate in the context he used it and it doesn't jive with yours:



And before someone goes down the "smarter people do have more merit" road just keep in mind that same argument has been used against all kinds of different groups of people.

Personally I think a lot of smart people would be out of luck if they said, "harder workers do have more merit" or "more socially acceptable people do have more merit."

"Good looking people do have more merit."