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acadapter commented on Startups are pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics   wsj.com/tech/biotech/gene... · Posted by u/nradov
pessimizer · 3 months ago
> "Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"

Nobody requires you to have children. Your problem could just as easily have been infertility. So instead of gambling, you can choose to treat having a genetic disease like being infertile, or you can dabble in eugenics. My "rigid ethics" frowns on eugenics. We have lots of children who have already been born who need help. They may never satisfy your desire to see your (admittedly bad) genetics reflected in the world, but maybe they could give a legacy to your intellect and compassion?

Eugenics was once very popular among the middle and upper classes, though, before there were incidents. There's no reason to think that it won't be popular again. I think that society as a whole has to decide how we treat human lives though; your children don't strictly belong to you, they belong to themselves and are protected by the state (even against you.) I'm totally comfortable if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be criminal, or if we decide that this sort of thing is going to be mandatory. I just know where I sit on the issue.

And I also know that the places that eugenics survived was in things like dog and cat breeding, and the preferences of people for dogs and cats did not make them healthy, it made them interesting. Ready for the human version of "Twisty Cats"?

acadapter · 3 months ago
What if, for example, a dentist refuses to remove malformed wisdom teeth because his morals don't allow him to fix problems that a person is born with, and only fixes tooth damage caused by accidents?

The taboo against genetic repairs is more comparable to antivax, rather than eugenics. Every part of the medical sciences is an intervention against "nature taking its course", in order to prevent harm to the individual.

acadapter commented on Startups are pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics   wsj.com/tech/biotech/gene... · Posted by u/nradov
acadapter · 3 months ago
This kind of blanket ban reasoning is kind of cruel to people with genetic diseases in their family line.

"Hey, you've got a broken gene? Sucks to be you, my rigid ethics requires you to play the lottery with worse odds than the others!"

In another thread about the same subject, I mentioned the issue of color blindness, and how some professions are open to ~92% of men and ~99.5% of women (because of how it's inherited). Society seems to be quite uninterested to start some wide campaign to replace color-coded information, even during the 2010s when the equality debate was active, it was never "upgraded" to include male issues like these.

With DNA editing, this problem could be fixed on the other side (along with much more serious issues that can affect an unlucky individual).

I don't know why there is so much fear to be out-competed by a hypothetical "superhuman", when the most easy implementation of DNA editing seems to be fixing genetic diseases (often "flipping one letter" to the correct one)?

acadapter commented on He Jiankui PhD Thesis: Spontaneous Emergence of Hierarchy in Biological Systems (2010)   repository.rice.edu/serve... · Posted by u/gradus_ad
jryb · 3 months ago
No one will touch this guy with a ten foot pole. Nothing he did technically was novel - it was just that everyone who had the skills to edit an embryo was unwilling and uninterested in doing so. Having him as part of your organization basically broadcasts to the world that you’re going to be doing wildly unethical things. Not a great path to commercialization of any therapeutic.
acadapter · 3 months ago
This is sad though. I'd rather see that ethics gets upgraded so some problems can be fixed.

For example, about 8% of men get excluded from certain professions such as being a train driver, due to color blindness. And society doesn't seem to care enough to switch to colorblind-friendly signaling.

With gene editing, this problem could be repaired in the other end, so that men will have the same chance as women to get perfect vision.

acadapter commented on The Great Feminization   compactmag.com/article/th... · Posted by u/blackethylene
acadapter · 4 months ago
I was hoping that this article would be about a hypothetical future where people have evolved to have a lower amount of bravery and a lower "fighting spirit", so that they're simply to afraid to fly fighter jets or be nuclear submarine captains.
acadapter commented on A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet   theguardian.com/education... · Posted by u/Hooke
gavinray · 7 months ago
Having a language in which the exact same letter(s) make different sounds only based on context is absurd.

Spanish, for example: everything is spelled exactly the way it sounds, a sane design.

acadapter · 7 months ago
Would it be sane to have a special letter to distinguish the "p" in "park" from the "p" in "spark"? In some languages, it's important, but these two sounds can be represented by the same letter in others because they don't "compete" for the same contexts.

(the difference is aspirate vs. non-aspirate)

acadapter commented on A 1960s schools experiment that created a new alphabet   theguardian.com/education... · Posted by u/Hooke
throw310822 · 7 months ago
I always thought the exact opposite would be helpful: don't touch the alphabet but instead teach a fluent phonetic system in which each single letter has a sound and each word can be pronounced exactly as it's written. Remembering the spelling of a word is as easy as remembering its sound in the alternative phonetic system.
acadapter · 7 months ago
Phonemics is more important than phonetics for these things. Sometimes two sounds need to be represented with the same letter if they are similar and their difference is context-dependent.

Then there's also the etymology and handling of grammatical endings. Polish spelling would be more difficult without "rz" for example, despite its two sounds already existing elsewhere in the spelling system.

acadapter commented on Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)   scientificamerican.com/bl... · Posted by u/Tomte
IshKebab · a year ago
Very interesting. I like the explanation of why studies often find minimal gender differences despite large differences being obvious in real life. Also it's kind of hilarious how the list of traits that they've found in men and women are exactly the stereotypes that everyone knows but you aren't allowed to say any more.
acadapter · a year ago
I also noticed that part in the article.

>Why do we have all these studies showing that male and female behaviors are so similar, yet people in everyday life continue to think as if males and females were very separable?

It could be that some gender-neutral behavior patterns are part of the modern Western equivalent of "tatemae", and that they easily appear in studies because of interaction with strangers.

acadapter commented on Subsonic Weapon used on the crowd in Belgrade today   old.reddit.com/r/PrepperI... · Posted by u/justinzollars
LarsDu88 · a year ago
Rumors of some sort of Russian sonic weapon being behind the "Havana Syndrome" have been going around for years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COWTBEl1rRc

Serbia has been Russia's closest ally for decades, with Russia having its side in the wars of the 90s. Perhaps such a weapon would have been provided to support the current pro-Moscow government.

Alternatively (and more likely) the Serbian government could've simply bought an LRAD device from the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device

Which

acadapter · a year ago
Most of the research on this, has been done in the US though...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

u/acadapter

KarmaCake day1228September 4, 2021View Original