Re:My genes are shit.
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm stunned to see so much unselfish, practical wisdom. Speaking as an adopted child, I have always held that it's how you raise children, not where they come from that matters. People are so egotistical about how important it is for their kids to be their biological product, even if it means knowingly putting those kids at risk. Some parents even seem to be proud of the defects they pass on, like blindness or deafness is 'special' in a positive way. (I'm not saying that such people should be ashamed. Traits are not things to be proud or ashamed of. Only actions can be rationally appreciated or denounced.)
Another curmudgeonly luddite dismisses future advances as 'too complicated'. '640k ought to be enough for everybody' comes to mind, as does what Napoleon said to Robert Fulton: 'You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense.'
Only a fool would think that genetic science is just to going to stop here and never move forward and solve the very problems and issues that vex it currently.
Re:Stop the train, i want to get off...
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
Apparently what she won't be able to have is a partner who's not too old, ugly and stupid for her league for some reason.
(That's a joke, son.)
While Gattaca is a good movie, the fundamental premise is misleading. We already have a hierarchical society where capacity and merit play a large role in who succeeds and who doesn't. Whether somebody is more capable naturally or 'artificially' is functionally meaningless. The only thing selection does is increase the number of capable people in the population of an already hierarchical society.
Eugenics
-noun (used with a singular verb)
the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, esp. by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).
Sorry, it's eugenics. Too bad subjective interpretations of history don't eliminate the actual origins and meanings of words arising many years before such associations.
There is nothing wrong with improvement through embryonic selection. Random fertilization is not some magical, righteous moral highground. Forced sterilization is wrong, executing the disabled is wrong, but there's nothing wrong with letting somebody say 'this is what I would like to grow in my womb thanks very much'. Or perhaps we should decriminalize rape? Can't be too selective. (Yes, that's a strawman. It's just for drama.)
Yeah, now look what we've done, we're so screwed that average lifespan has doubled and still increasing. Those antibiotics really suck.
And come on, you're arguing about hidden advantages to diseases? Just because it's possible doesn't make it probable or worthwhile in any understood balance. When you're trying to balance a very inconvenient and/or painful and/or fatal condition versus maybe someday somebody somewhere might possibly find something positive about the condition, I don't think it takes years of medical training to figure out where to go with that.
And you think that trying to screen out lower mental capacities is dangerous and stupid? Eugenics was given a very bad name by the actions of its proponents during the first half of the 20th century, but that's like saying jet aircraft are bad because the Nazis did most of the development. It is entirely possible to limit eugenics to embryonic selection and not go around forcibly sterilizing people or executing the disabled. The net effect is positive, and the old argument about creating a hierarchical society is bullshit. We already HAVE one. Smarter people already are the haves and dumber people the have-nots (except in the entertainment and sports industries). Embryonic selection based on mental potential would just increase the numbers of intelligent people in the hierarchical society that already exists.
Show animals are generally not bread to increase their health. Furthermore, 'surviving in the wild' is as much or more behavioral as it is physical. If you dropped stock brokers in the middle of the Amazon most of them would die because they wouldn't know what to do, not because they were physically incapable of doing it. Animals that grow up in captivity don't have a behavioral model to follow, and instinct usually is not enough to overcome that lack, which is why those animals are rarely released.
It's far too simplistic to say 'all artificial selection categorically fails' especially given that the science behind it is improving. Early artificial selection wasn't based on anything but 'I like X better than Y' with no insight even possible to the broader genetic issues. Fatal defects like you speak of are more likely to be caught in active and productive research than they are in natural selection. Natural selection is great, but considering we're the first life on this planet to be able to understand a genome even a little, I think we should probably pursue it a little further eh?
Even in the US it is in many states. Try firing somebody in WA or CA based on sexual orientation. You'll be forking over cash so fast you'd think your wallet had consumed an emetic.
It's pretty easy to say 'I'm gay' in a comment somewhere. If you're being truthful, I'd still have to say that you are to gay people what Uncle Ruckus is to black people. Of course there are proper places and degrees of public disclosure/practice of one's sexuality, but gay & lesbian couples are censured all the time for things said and done by straight people without any kind of censure. The way MS has outline its policy, it's ok (as it should be) for some male to have a profile and innocuously mention he has a wife, but if a male with similar innocuity casually mentions he has a husband, BANNED. BAN HAMMER. ONE WAY TICKET TO BAN-TOWN. And you, as a supposedly 'gay' person, support that? If so, you need therapy, because it would seem that you think that in equivalent situations, your affiliation/identification makes you inherently inferior. Oh, and for the record, I'm bi.
Yeah, too bad it's in the 5% that matters, given that CA has pretty much the highest tech density in the world, sets all the trends, and it's also home to ICANN.
Aw motherfuck I must have clicked the anonymous box accidentally. No karma for me. Anyway post is here for those who have thresholds set at 2 and wouldn't see it.
It's amusing how naive and anachronistic people can be about the thoughts and feelings of people over 200 years ago, especially given that the issues of race and slavery have been so conflated by modern interpretations of history.
Slavery had virtually nothing to do with race in antiquity, Aristotle considered it to be nothing more than the bottom tier of a meritocracy. The Bible spoke of slavery as a social position to be endured rather than reformed (an attitude that the South latched onto with both hands of course) with no mention of race. The Romans were probably the slavin'-est bitches around, having no qualms about putting every ethnicity they could find under the yoke, including their own. Funny how all the honkies the Romans enslaved didn't whine about being victims for centuries. Instead, when the Roman empire showed weakness they kicked the shit out of it and moved on with their lives. (Albeit into the darkest period of recorded history, but that's neither here nor there.)
All of this is important because the founding fathers were obsessed with antiquity, both directly and through the rehashing of other thinkers from the Renaissance and Enlightenment (if anybody is interested the topic is well covered in Morton White's Philosophy of the American Revolution). Anyway, point is slavery has a history before racism and is not inherently racist. Racism itself is a completely modern abstraction. Every culture on earth has some history of ethnocentrism, only through comparison and synthesis can values be assigned to decide which culture might actually deserve to feel superior. But from the inside of a culture looking out, another culture is almost invariably 'the barbarians and/or heathens'. Only in the West is there enough white guilt to have significantly mitigated that impulse. It sure as hell is alive and well in Asia. I would wager it's harder for a non-Korean to marry into a Korean family than it is for a black person to marry into a white family in the US. (Speaking from experience on the latter.)
This is modded insightful? "For all the theories for there being intelligent life Out There, there are as many that run against it." Sounds like what Creationists call an 'argument' against evolution. Nothing but the vague implication that some kind of opposing view exists somewhere. I for one would really like to hear some of these theories against extraterrestrial life. While I won't turn to the Drake Equation, I'll just say how in the hell do you expect that out of a trillion or so stars in our galaxy alone that we happen to be in the only place that has life? Especially given that our star is of a fairly common type (and so therefore solar systems like ours should be similarly common). ET life might be irrelevant for practical reasons, but to call it unlikely would require making some very unbalanced statistical assumptions.
A favorite rhetorical device of Cicero was to say 'I'm not going to say X about Y' as a preface to saying exactly those things. If most people think you're implying something in your statements, the chances are greater that you're in denial about your own motivations than a majority is likely to be wrong in interpretation. In fact the poster was spot on in saying that it shows you believe the actions of others are at least wrong, and you admit 'If I was in charge of your kids, I wouldn't let them play such games either.' Then you go on to say you have no interest in judging, after having made a judgment, albeit passively. You're in denial.
Teaching through video games is no less valid than teaching through films or books. There are worthless films like Date/Scary/Epic Movie, and there are things like Band of Brothers that might as well be a documentary (not to mention specifically documentaries on film). There are trashy books as well, like the romance novels in grocery stores, does that mean we should throw out the rest of the library? Of course there's nothing to be learned from Quake II, but I would say somebody really paying attention to Civ IV would probably learn more than the average high schooler does about applied and synthetic disciplines of the humanities. For chrissake, it has Leonard Nimoy narrating Aristotle, Publius Syrus, Cicero, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson among many others between depicting all the common elements of a turn-based strategy.
Actually, the economic impact of bombing civilians was not the original motivation. The whole thing started during the Battle of Britain and was basically just a back and forth of "I'll do you for that!" Some German bombers went off course, hit the wrong stuff, and the British of course not only refused to believe it was an accident, but retaliated in kind more than once. Of course the Germans weren't going to take repeated retaliations lying down, so they went all out, and the British did as well, and when the Americans joined the war they felt the bar had already been lowered so they did the same thing in both theaters of war. However why you think an economic focus for killing civilians as opposed to rape/pillage/intimidation is an important distinction I can't figure. (In fact, weighing motivations for slaughter, economics is probably slightly more civilized than classical rape/pillage/intimidation if such a thing can be said.)
Further, I would say it's not a matter of thinking 'modern' or 'medieval' but simply thinking about what strategy succeeds in the context of the game as it was designed, which further feeds into my previous statement that you literally have difficulty disentangling reality from fiction. You could replace the depictions of humans in AoE with differently colored cubes and the game would play the same, mechanically, but you'd feel differently about it because you're looking at it as more than a mechanical abstraction. Too bad it's not more than a mechanical abstraction that just has human depictions to give it an easily understood context.
Somebody needs to read Commentarii de Bello Gallico. From the beginning of recorded history in conflicts large and small, groups of people are routinely killed as a show of force. Caesar's records of handling Gauls, Britons and Germans are particularly clear. The idea is always to 'send a message' to anybody else who's thinking of opposition. It has nothing to do with nationalism.
It also seems as though your gaming experience is lacking. All the things you speak of in terms of a 'realistic game' exist to one degree on another in Firaxis games like Civ IV and Alpha Centauri. Granted, when I play those (and I do excessively) I turn random events that effect population (like disease) off, but otherwise it's all there.
The other posters are correct. It seems to me that you have a hard time with what is a clear difference between games and simulations with real events. The depictions of villagers in AOE aren't real people. They don't have families, goals, lives, etc. They're stupid sprites somebody drew to represent certain abstract capacities in a game that happen to look like people and are easily and intuitively understood in a common context (it takes labor to get resource X to place of use Y).
If you're so sensitive that seeing a depiction of demise in art (these are drawings remember, they just happen to be part of the goal-oriented framework of a game) evokes a reaction on a level with reality, that is the literal definition of confusing fiction and reality.
This was the first thing I thought of. Too bad being pulled into the bosom of a hot chick in a leather or latex power suit and having your hair stroked will never be a common method of promoting innovation. Sigh.
States' rights isn't a 'discredited ideology', it's the Tenth Amendment. WA (where I live) put together a similar memorial legislation for the new administration.
You're conflating states' rights with full-fledged secession, which is what I'd expect of a Hamiltonian.
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I'm stunned to see so much unselfish, practical wisdom. Speaking as an adopted child, I have always held that it's how you raise children, not where they come from that matters. People are so egotistical about how important it is for their kids to be their biological product, even if it means knowingly putting those kids at risk. Some parents even seem to be proud of the defects they pass on, like blindness or deafness is 'special' in a positive way. (I'm not saying that such people should be ashamed. Traits are not things to be proud or ashamed of. Only actions can be rationally appreciated or denounced.)
Another curmudgeonly luddite dismisses future advances as 'too complicated'. '640k ought to be enough for everybody' comes to mind, as does what Napoleon said to Robert Fulton: 'You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense.'
Only a fool would think that genetic science is just to going to stop here and never move forward and solve the very problems and issues that vex it currently.
Apparently what she won't be able to have is a partner who's not too old, ugly and stupid for her league for some reason.
(That's a joke, son.)
While Gattaca is a good movie, the fundamental premise is misleading. We already have a hierarchical society where capacity and merit play a large role in who succeeds and who doesn't. Whether somebody is more capable naturally or 'artificially' is functionally meaningless. The only thing selection does is increase the number of capable people in the population of an already hierarchical society.
Tell that to the Romans.
Eugenics
-noun (used with a singular verb)
the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, esp. by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).
Sorry, it's eugenics. Too bad subjective interpretations of history don't eliminate the actual origins and meanings of words arising many years before such associations.
There is nothing wrong with improvement through embryonic selection. Random fertilization is not some magical, righteous moral highground. Forced sterilization is wrong, executing the disabled is wrong, but there's nothing wrong with letting somebody say 'this is what I would like to grow in my womb thanks very much'. Or perhaps we should decriminalize rape? Can't be too selective. (Yes, that's a strawman. It's just for drama.)
Yeah, now look what we've done, we're so screwed that average lifespan has doubled and still increasing. Those antibiotics really suck.
And come on, you're arguing about hidden advantages to diseases? Just because it's possible doesn't make it probable or worthwhile in any understood balance. When you're trying to balance a very inconvenient and/or painful and/or fatal condition versus maybe someday somebody somewhere might possibly find something positive about the condition, I don't think it takes years of medical training to figure out where to go with that.
And you think that trying to screen out lower mental capacities is dangerous and stupid? Eugenics was given a very bad name by the actions of its proponents during the first half of the 20th century, but that's like saying jet aircraft are bad because the Nazis did most of the development. It is entirely possible to limit eugenics to embryonic selection and not go around forcibly sterilizing people or executing the disabled. The net effect is positive, and the old argument about creating a hierarchical society is bullshit. We already HAVE one. Smarter people already are the haves and dumber people the have-nots (except in the entertainment and sports industries). Embryonic selection based on mental potential would just increase the numbers of intelligent people in the hierarchical society that already exists.
Show animals are generally not bread to increase their health. Furthermore, 'surviving in the wild' is as much or more behavioral as it is physical. If you dropped stock brokers in the middle of the Amazon most of them would die because they wouldn't know what to do, not because they were physically incapable of doing it. Animals that grow up in captivity don't have a behavioral model to follow, and instinct usually is not enough to overcome that lack, which is why those animals are rarely released.
It's far too simplistic to say 'all artificial selection categorically fails' especially given that the science behind it is improving. Early artificial selection wasn't based on anything but 'I like X better than Y' with no insight even possible to the broader genetic issues. Fatal defects like you speak of are more likely to be caught in active and productive research than they are in natural selection. Natural selection is great, but considering we're the first life on this planet to be able to understand a genome even a little, I think we should probably pursue it a little further eh?
Even in the US it is in many states. Try firing somebody in WA or CA based on sexual orientation. You'll be forking over cash so fast you'd think your wallet had consumed an emetic.
I'll bet they don't complain about all the gay female tourist money.
It's pretty easy to say 'I'm gay' in a comment somewhere. If you're being truthful, I'd still have to say that you are to gay people what Uncle Ruckus is to black people. Of course there are proper places and degrees of public disclosure/practice of one's sexuality, but gay & lesbian couples are censured all the time for things said and done by straight people without any kind of censure. The way MS has outline its policy, it's ok (as it should be) for some male to have a profile and innocuously mention he has a wife, but if a male with similar innocuity casually mentions he has a husband, BANNED. BAN HAMMER. ONE WAY TICKET TO BAN-TOWN. And you, as a supposedly 'gay' person, support that? If so, you need therapy, because it would seem that you think that in equivalent situations, your affiliation/identification makes you inherently inferior. Oh, and for the record, I'm bi.
Yeah, too bad it's in the 5% that matters, given that CA has pretty much the highest tech density in the world, sets all the trends, and it's also home to ICANN.
Aw motherfuck I must have clicked the anonymous box accidentally. No karma for me. Anyway post is here for those who have thresholds set at 2 and wouldn't see it.
It's amusing how naive and anachronistic people can be about the thoughts and feelings of people over 200 years ago, especially given that the issues of race and slavery have been so conflated by modern interpretations of history.
Slavery had virtually nothing to do with race in antiquity, Aristotle considered it to be nothing more than the bottom tier of a meritocracy. The Bible spoke of slavery as a social position to be endured rather than reformed (an attitude that the South latched onto with both hands of course) with no mention of race. The Romans were probably the slavin'-est bitches around, having no qualms about putting every ethnicity they could find under the yoke, including their own. Funny how all the honkies the Romans enslaved didn't whine about being victims for centuries. Instead, when the Roman empire showed weakness they kicked the shit out of it and moved on with their lives. (Albeit into the darkest period of recorded history, but that's neither here nor there.)
All of this is important because the founding fathers were obsessed with antiquity, both directly and through the rehashing of other thinkers from the Renaissance and Enlightenment (if anybody is interested the topic is well covered in Morton White's Philosophy of the American Revolution). Anyway, point is slavery has a history before racism and is not inherently racist. Racism itself is a completely modern abstraction. Every culture on earth has some history of ethnocentrism, only through comparison and synthesis can values be assigned to decide which culture might actually deserve to feel superior. But from the inside of a culture looking out, another culture is almost invariably 'the barbarians and/or heathens'. Only in the West is there enough white guilt to have significantly mitigated that impulse. It sure as hell is alive and well in Asia. I would wager it's harder for a non-Korean to marry into a Korean family than it is for a black person to marry into a white family in the US. (Speaking from experience on the latter.)
Learn To Thread. The AC was responding to geekboy who responded to the AC. The SCOTUS was only mentioned by Ravon who was not replied to.
They made a movie of that, called Zardoz ;-p
Mod parent up.
This is modded insightful? "For all the theories for there being intelligent life Out There, there are as many that run against it." Sounds like what Creationists call an 'argument' against evolution. Nothing but the vague implication that some kind of opposing view exists somewhere. I for one would really like to hear some of these theories against extraterrestrial life. While I won't turn to the Drake Equation, I'll just say how in the hell do you expect that out of a trillion or so stars in our galaxy alone that we happen to be in the only place that has life? Especially given that our star is of a fairly common type (and so therefore solar systems like ours should be similarly common). ET life might be irrelevant for practical reasons, but to call it unlikely would require making some very unbalanced statistical assumptions.
A favorite rhetorical device of Cicero was to say 'I'm not going to say X about Y' as a preface to saying exactly those things. If most people think you're implying something in your statements, the chances are greater that you're in denial about your own motivations than a majority is likely to be wrong in interpretation. In fact the poster was spot on in saying that it shows you believe the actions of others are at least wrong, and you admit 'If I was in charge of your kids, I wouldn't let them play such games either.' Then you go on to say you have no interest in judging, after having made a judgment, albeit passively. You're in denial.
Teaching through video games is no less valid than teaching through films or books. There are worthless films like Date/Scary/Epic Movie, and there are things like Band of Brothers that might as well be a documentary (not to mention specifically documentaries on film). There are trashy books as well, like the romance novels in grocery stores, does that mean we should throw out the rest of the library? Of course there's nothing to be learned from Quake II, but I would say somebody really paying attention to Civ IV would probably learn more than the average high schooler does about applied and synthetic disciplines of the humanities. For chrissake, it has Leonard Nimoy narrating Aristotle, Publius Syrus, Cicero, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson among many others between depicting all the common elements of a turn-based strategy.
Actually, the economic impact of bombing civilians was not the original motivation. The whole thing started during the Battle of Britain and was basically just a back and forth of "I'll do you for that!" Some German bombers went off course, hit the wrong stuff, and the British of course not only refused to believe it was an accident, but retaliated in kind more than once. Of course the Germans weren't going to take repeated retaliations lying down, so they went all out, and the British did as well, and when the Americans joined the war they felt the bar had already been lowered so they did the same thing in both theaters of war. However why you think an economic focus for killing civilians as opposed to rape/pillage/intimidation is an important distinction I can't figure. (In fact, weighing motivations for slaughter, economics is probably slightly more civilized than classical rape/pillage/intimidation if such a thing can be said.)
Further, I would say it's not a matter of thinking 'modern' or 'medieval' but simply thinking about what strategy succeeds in the context of the game as it was designed, which further feeds into my previous statement that you literally have difficulty disentangling reality from fiction. You could replace the depictions of humans in AoE with differently colored cubes and the game would play the same, mechanically, but you'd feel differently about it because you're looking at it as more than a mechanical abstraction. Too bad it's not more than a mechanical abstraction that just has human depictions to give it an easily understood context.
Somebody needs to read Commentarii de Bello Gallico. From the beginning of recorded history in conflicts large and small, groups of people are routinely killed as a show of force. Caesar's records of handling Gauls, Britons and Germans are particularly clear. The idea is always to 'send a message' to anybody else who's thinking of opposition. It has nothing to do with nationalism.
It also seems as though your gaming experience is lacking. All the things you speak of in terms of a 'realistic game' exist to one degree on another in Firaxis games like Civ IV and Alpha Centauri. Granted, when I play those (and I do excessively) I turn random events that effect population (like disease) off, but otherwise it's all there.
The other posters are correct. It seems to me that you have a hard time with what is a clear difference between games and simulations with real events. The depictions of villagers in AOE aren't real people. They don't have families, goals, lives, etc. They're stupid sprites somebody drew to represent certain abstract capacities in a game that happen to look like people and are easily and intuitively understood in a common context (it takes labor to get resource X to place of use Y).
If you're so sensitive that seeing a depiction of demise in art (these are drawings remember, they just happen to be part of the goal-oriented framework of a game) evokes a reaction on a level with reality, that is the literal definition of confusing fiction and reality.
This was the first thing I thought of. Too bad being pulled into the bosom of a hot chick in a leather or latex power suit and having your hair stroked will never be a common method of promoting innovation. Sigh.
States' rights isn't a 'discredited ideology', it's the Tenth Amendment. WA (where I live) put together a similar memorial legislation for the new administration.
You're conflating states' rights with full-fledged secession, which is what I'd expect of a Hamiltonian.
Actually 'cad' as an invective is far more British than American. I don't think I've ever heard it used by an American except sarcastically.
Of course I always think of this sketch by British comedian Harry Enfield when the subject of caddishness is raised.
/Signed