It reminds me of a debugging technique I sometimes use, to prove to myself I understand a complex issue I try to make it worse. If I can then I almost certainly understand how to fix it too.
Problem is there is autism like (maybe) Einstein or Tesla and then there is autism where the child can't communicate or adapt to any form of human social interaction or contact. The former is neurodiversity, the latter a debilitating disease.
These are not the same thing and need different terms.
Is there any evidence that they have different underlying causes or are otherwise fundamentally distinct rather than one simply being an extreme case of the other? (Honest question; I'm not familiar with the literature here.)
Or, even if they were in some sense fundamentally the same, is your argument that their effects are so practically different that they ought to be called by distinct names anyway?
Asperger's used to be classified separately but is now considered part of the autism spectrum. That said, I don't think this was done primarily because of a consensus over there being just one 'fundamental type' of autism.
As I understand it, there isn't even a consensus on any theory of what autism fundamentally is. Some theories try to explain the social issues as a lack of Theory Of mind, but these theories don't cover the many other symptoms typical of autism. One more recent theory ('Intense Worlds') does present a 'fundamental' explanation for all/most symptoms, but AFAIK it's not well-accepted or supported by evidence (yet), and the fact that it explains so much is also considered a drawback (too vague / overfitting / whatever the term is).
> Or, even if they were in some sense fundamentally the same, is your argument that their effects are so practically different that they ought to be called by distinct names anyway?
I've noticed that there seems to be a movement in treatment approach that focuses on treating individual symptoms without focusing too much on the overarching 'labels'. In my experience it's been a very nice, down to earth approach, and it strikes me as more measurable too. This approach strikes me as particularly useful for autism because there's so much variation between different autists and the particular symptoms they exhibit.
They are the same thing, just as someone with a slight sniffle and someone with a sinus infection can both have a cold, and there are lots of places in between. We've also gotten a lot better at treatment: a significant fraction of children with large language delays end up living independently.
The recent developments of DSM-5 and ICD-11 show the opposite: decades of research failed to show any scientifically valid distinction between functional and non-functional autism. That's why they are being conflated into a single "autism spectrum disorder" category.
Those books exist as a method for billing insurance. The DSM only recently (1983) stopped considering homosexuality a diagnosis.
As a result we're hearing the phrase "somewhere on the spectrum" for any number of behaviors we don't see fitting the norm, and the reality of autism is not this "beautiful mind" scenario for many, but instead a crippling illness like the AP mentions. They are definitely not the same thing to the people who live with them.
The article is completely centered around the media image that autism creates geniuses, and that's a dangerous, misleading idea at best. The reality of living with it is usually much more ugly. Children who often become grown adults who can't make connections between cause and effect violently lashing out, throwing feces, biting care givers, screaming, screaming, and more screaming.
We should absolutely keep looking for ways to prevent and try to treat/cure it, and not act like everything is fine and great and accept it as diversity, for the sake of those who can't live normally.
As someone who falls in the "Beautiful Mind" end of the spectrum I find it insulting and abhorrent that people would do anything OTHER than cure us if they could.
Beneath superficial success and contribution, my life is a nonstop Munchian scream. I find it less insulting when people say everyone on the spectrum should be exterminated, than when people say some of us should be allowed to continue existing because our particular end of the spectrum happens to write pretty code / invent pretty theorems / etc.
On the other hand, I've met high-functioning autists that feel offended at the idea that people want to cure them. My cousin is on the "very crippled side" of the spectrum, so I'd give anything for a cure. So I guess if the person can understand the concept, it should be their own call.
I'm very surprised that two authors that are commonly confused with each other would make a secondary plot point about the same subject that is very weakly related to their main interests.
This isn't as inconsistent as it seems. People would probably also be equally uncomfortable with both the idea of "editing" an embryo's genome to make it light-skinned, and the inverse idea of editing it to make it dark-skinned.
While it's not important enough for genetic engineering on it's own, I'd probably edit my children to be darker. Having spent a few days on the beach in Thailand, the genetic inferiority of my own fair skin is quite visible and painful.
Pale skin is thought to have evolved as a rapid (last ~5k years) and crude adaptation to avoid vitamin D deficiency shortly after farming was developed and allowed non-animal-based diets at the very high latitudes of northern Europe.
It is reasonable to think that there the significant drawbacks associated with that hacked-together solution are no longer necessary because modern diets easily give adequate vitamin D.
No, what you're saying is that "hey look at me! I'm joining in and parroting the modern destructive and discursive forces and saying that nature in her infinite wisdom made my skin pale, but pale skin is bad, bad, bad, oh the noble savage, oh to not be so pale, oh and race doesn't exist, but hey let's disparage whites, and promote inflated and romantic notions of all other races. "
Oh, and also in this ridiculousness I was quickly caught up in a logical fallacy, but no, no "that's not what I'm saying."
crude adaptation
Who are to you to say what adaption is and isn't crude?
It is reasonable to think that there the significant drawbacks associated with that hacked-together solution
Normally "genocide" is considered bad because it results in living people being killed. I think we can all agree that killing a living person against their will is bad.
But with what you describe as "genocide," not a single person is harmed. To me, an African American person has the same intrinsic value as a white person or anyone else. Therefore, I can't see any particular reason why I should care if we have more or fewer African Americans in the world.
I'm familiar with the argument made by deaf people. But those advocates never seem to address the reversal argument; why shouldn't we also produce new deaf people (e.g. by sedating some children and painlessly puncturing their eardrums) in pursuit of this goal?
Skin color is a relatively minor component of race, race describes the clustering of a whole host of traits and characteristics in a group of individuals.
Yellow-skinned Africans would still be Africans, purple-skinned Asians would still be Asians, and green-skinned Europeans would still be Europeans.
Skin color is a minor component of the actual makeup of race - but most of what "race" is, is political, economic and cultural. And skin color is a major factor in that regard, because it's an obvious way to discriminate between in and out groups.
When Obama was first running, there were discussions about whether or not he was "black enough" to really represent African American culture as President. Part of that was because of his upbringing (because, unfortunately, there is the perception that being educated, well spoken and wealthy is somehow antithetical to "true blackness") but part of it was the lightness of his skin color. It would have likely been easier for some people to accept his "white" background if he'd been physically darker.
You yourself correlated European with "white" in an earlier (probably still flagged) comment, so you know that references to skin color can seem intrinsic to many things to which it doesn't really apply.
I'd probably edit my children to be darker. Having spent a few days on the beach in Thailand, the genetic inferiority of my own fair skin is quite visible and painful.
Is this like reductio ad absurdum of PC signalling? Where do you spend the other 362 days of the year? In an environment that fair skin provides advantages for things like vitamin D production perhaps?
I spend the rest of the year in places that are not Norway or Sweden - places where even the darkest African or Tamil does not suffer vitamin D deficiency.
I find it very entertaining to be accused of PC signalling a few days after being accused of white supremacy.
What does it have with skin color? Just limit the sun for two or three days until you tan, no sunburns after that. It's not like Thais are black. Compare:
Hardly a big difference.
For genetic modification, the best solution is to increase range of tanning rather than changing the constant. It's already possible to get black skin [0] with eg. melanotan-2, so it's not that big of a change.
Perhaps I can chemically supplement myself to have the same powers that my African and Indian friends are born with. Why wouldn't I want my children to be born with that power?
Similarly, I'd like them to be born intelligent and naturally athletic.
Power to be D3 deficient? [0] Do you have some inferiority complex? It's objectively better to have white skin that can tan instead of a darker one. It's always possible to cover from the sun. Only disadvantage: in sunny climates, ~4x higher risk of skin cancer, but the absolute risk is still a minuscule ~25/100k.
"It is evident that as much as 69%-82% of the South Asian populations in India had 25(OH)D levels in plasma less than the minimum acceptable levels of 20 ng/ml"
Skin colors evolved when most people were outside for the entire day. Now the opposite is true.
There is an Arthur C. Clarke short story called Reunion in which Aliens send a message indicating that humans are actually descendants of alien colonists and that the aliens have finally found a cure for white skin.
The technology might have been developed after he wrote it, idk.
Tbh I was also just mentioning what I mentioned because I thought it was amusing/interesting/novel or uh, thought it would look good to mention or something
An illustrated transcript of a talk presented at the First Biennial
Conference on Induc
ed Humanoid Subspecies
Peter Watts, Ph.D.
FizerPharm
Evoconsumables
Ted Chiang wrote a short story, "The Evolution of Human Science", about that idea.
If I recall, the main premise was that new parents could choose to give their children a neurodevelopmental drug that would cause vastly increased intellectual prowess at the cost of gradually losing their connection to human society to the point of indecipherability.
I think it was a bit heavy-handed. But maybe I'm not remembering the story correctly.
The author has a point. As long as we don't understand how we're built and functioning, modifying our code is a bad idea. Learning by doing is only applicable when the thing in question is expendable, which is definitely not the case with the human genome.
The actual question is- what is or was neuro-diversity useful for?
Its a uncomfortable question, because the answers may insult conservative and progressive comfort zones.
The publicly condemned sadistic murderer, might be a perfectly adapted model-citizen for a society that wents savage every second generation.
The schizoid paranoid might be have been a model citizen in society ravaged by disease and bubonic plague, forming hate-filled sub-communitys, who would purge outsiders and self-quarantine.
The sexual-deviant might have been a model citizen in a society that had no real justice system, by being forced to uphold basic social contracts.
Autism would be a attempt of evolution to develop reliable automation and mass production in a medieval society in need of it.
All of this of course has to be "triggered" somehow, so there would be a feedback loop of mothers in the making, that create with the society they perceive, the counter measure of tomorrow.
Have strife and stress?
Next generation will have more psychopaths that see your genetic lottery ticket through that.
Have a disease like the anti-baby-pill?
Lots of paranoid schizophrenic that want humanity to retreat into gated community.
Of course non of this is written in stone, it is always how nature turned out by supply and demand. What we make of this, is completely open to debate, but it has to be made upon a foundation of well researched knowledge, not upon a wishing well.
There is no need to assume a reason for genetic variance or a particular genetic expression. The idea that evolution is directed, that each change is somehow purposeful has been fairly conclusively disproven: genetic drift has been observed nearly universally. As speculative fiction your ideas are somewhat interesting. I don't know if you've ever tried your hand at a short story, but it could be a good premise.
As I see it, neurodiversity is more useful if the environment suddenly changes. In a stable environmental niche most forms of neurodiversity are probably a drawback.
For instance (reflecting on your examples) it should be obvious to us that the word 'crime' meant something much narrower several thousand (or hundred) years ago.
I live with mental "illness". With respect to the brain, the diversity is our story. The types and subtypes are challenges on how to live, past and beyond the diagnosis.
Like it or not Autistic people will be weeded out of society through fetal genetic testing or other interventions. It will be a net loss for humanity, but I don't think there's anyway to stop it.
It's a paradox in that it's nearly impossible to appreciate the value of neurodiversity until you build a close relationship with such a person.
My cousin Tony with Downs's would have most likely been aborted decades ago if a test were available. What no one knew is that he would become so kind, good natured, and socialable it would bring incredible joy and love to literally hundreds of family members and friends. There won't be too many like him from now on: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/22/downs-syndrome-pe...
The paradox is that most families with Autistic or Down's children would tell you their lives have been greatly enriched. To outsiders it sounds like parents are in denial and blinded to their child's predicament. But it's not denial or sympathy, the value is beautiful, but invisible until you experience it.
On the other hand I have heard more than once people who do sometimes very secretly confess they wish their cousin/brother/etc with Down's had been aborted. They always talk about all the love and joy and positive things too. But at the end of the day, they say, they think they would have preferred it the other way. But this is not pretty, and it's not something people like to talk about. So if you just take what people say in public, you maybe don't get accurate representation.
Maybe the people I know are not good representation of the population, though!
In the case of extremely severe disabilities i think we can all completely understand that attitude. Those who don't understand or think it's weird have probably never had to care for someone with such a severe disability (i try my best to help out relatives who have a disabled child but i struggle to do it for more than a few hours at a time).
Sure, there will always be people who don't make the connection. Just like there are people who scale approval of their children based on accomplishments in sports, academics, or whatever.
I'm pretty sure that's a minority though. I'm involved in an organization where I interact with lots of ASD families and anecdotally at least there are not many regrets.
I once used the term "neurodiversity" in a meeting with the vice principal and a resource teacher in the context of the behaviour of one of my children. The knife-eyes and suspicious looks were amazing.
Lots of _talk_ in the school system about acceptance and anti-bullying, but I think our society has never been so intolerant of the diversity it claims to covet.
(We switched schools and things are much better now.)
I think we will start to limit our capability for diversity soon. Population control, anti-aging and direct genetic control will limit the opportunities for change. A case of our short term culture conflicting with our long term biology.
It's a pity because we will be less likely to ever become something we can't already imagine.
Even though my intuition tells me that I should support neurodiversity my reasoning keeps failing to justify it without introducing "diversity is unconditionally good" as an axiom. I find it difficult to add it to the list of axioms I support because it seems like hypocrasy to endorse diversity considering the history of humans.
Almost every human has the ability to learn and speak language, which is unique to mankind. (What media often reports as an animal language is not a language in that it doesn't have recursion -- the ability to handle it is, Chomsky and his supporters believe, unique to humans)
But shortly after language was born, in the very first stage of evolution of language, there must have been significant percentage of people who could not learn language. Where did they go? The answer is: they went extinct, failing to reproduce. And that's why we all can learn and speak language. The ancestors of us are those who could speak it. By making it difficult to reproduce for those who couldn't speak language, through the process of natural selection, we managed to build society where almost all of the members can speak it. Having autism in this era is analogous to being non-verbal in the early stage of humans.
With that said, endorsing diversity seems to be denial of evolution to me, denial of how we have come this far. It is by putting selection pressure on those who cannot adapt to society. And the sad reality is, you cannot stop it from happening. Autistic people will go extinct, even without the gene-editing technology, just like non-verbal people went extinct.
Why do autistic people have to go extinct? Can't we support them in this wealthy day and age? Couldn't great cognitive tools lie beneath autism and other supposed illnesses? In my experience, "normal" people are the most boring because they can't think in (what they would consider) contorted ways.
There's a whole spectrum of people, one end which defines large parts of society, the plain average. On the other end are people whose minds are so distorted relative to the norm that it's impossible for them to function in our society. I would put the blame for that on society not being diverse or open enough.
It seems to me that evolution works because of diversity: an organism diversifies through mutations to the point where one type gets an advantage over the others and survives. Think of it this way: If you limit yourself to what you already know, you'll be turning in circles, constantly reaching the same conclusions for the same problems. Let some outside knowledge/factors mess things up and you'll be able to move on.
I don't think it's possible to edit autism out until it's actually understood on a mechanical level. It's likely that's what's now called 'autism' in reality are several completely different things with vaguely similar symptoms.
Once it's understood, I don't think it's going to disappear: positive forms of it (ie. milder Asperger's) are going to become a niche option for parents, along with high iq edits of course. The 'little Einstein' option on a menu.
Hi, I have milder asperger's, and I've been highly successful by most objective measures (great job in finance, make more money than both my parents combined, trophy wife, etc.)
If I could go back and start over without the disease, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant sacrificing all that success and being a fry-cook all my life.
I'm completely fucking isolated. Like, a million miles away.
Someone at work invites me to a party. I go, I have fun. I never get invited again. New person gets hired, pattern repeats. Reliable as a clock.
My wife? I picked her up using techniques from the seduction community, which I studied like a science and practiced for over a year. I did that because I was tired of being a virgin, now I hate this relationship and feel powerless to escape it. BTW, during that seduction community time I spent endless hours at bars and clubs, surrounded by people having fun and pretending to have fun myself. I never had any fun there. It was more of a war zone which I tolerated in pursuit of a goal.
At work I feel like the mythical Cassandra, cursed to see the future but no-one will believe you. (I'm a programmer, of course.) I wish I could just treat it like a job that doesn't matter, and that it wouldn't physically pain me when some idiot can't even follow in-house variable-naming conventions, etc.
Sure, I guess I can't be 100% certain that fry-cooks aren't in their own screaming hell, just like I can't be 100% sure I'm not living in Plato's cave. But I think that's pretty fucking academic compared to the above things which I can be sure of.
The adage 'birds of a feather flock together' is a true one. Our ability to communicate with each other relies most strongly on shared experience esp. with regard to normative behavior, thoughts.
I would not advise you to act as neurotypical but to seek out your own kind. That might not be easily found in collected pools of humans but to take a leaf out of the Major's book: 'The net is vast and infinite.'
How many of us have mentioned an obscure topic in passing on HN, and then been surprised by an erudite observation? Of course this does not always prevail, but it happens with enough frequency that I am convinced for each person there are companions.
To be less academic, if there are conventions for furries, then there are places in the world for you too!
It is frequently noted that geeks do much better at themed events with a purpose than at generic social outings. Less night club, more book club. The more object oriented the activity, the easier geeks get along. If you've been to a Hackerspace you'll know there is a wide range of interesting people at such places.
P.S. Every line cook I've known does claim to be in their own screaming hell.
You sound like someone who could benefit from 300μg of LSD to think his life through and perhaps make major changes, alternatively psylocybin. No offense, but it seems like you're mindlessly executing a social script meant for someone completely different. Like a Westworld host's loop (a tv series).
Regarding parties, if you want to make yourself social, try MDMA with selegiline. Selegiline is to prevent MDMA from being neurotoxic [0].
>BTW, during that seduction community time I spent endless hours at bars and clubs, surrounded by people having fun and pretending to have fun myself. I never had any fun there. It was more of a war zone which I tolerated in pursuit of a goal.
You weren't alone. Most, if not all, men go to clubs in hope of getting laid. Those that have fun find the whole process fun; a game. They are the most extroverted ones so it may seem like it's the normal way to spend free time, but in reality they're a small minority. Nothing weird with not liking it, or not getting along with those that like it.
>I did that because I was tired of being a virgin
Literally, or do you mean combined with being single? If literally, why all that work on seduction instead of paying a prostitute?
You remind me of a friend. We don't talk to each other anymore, though, because he found a way to focus his mad drive for computers. He's a brilliant programmer and a bit narcissistic. By getting into college I think he found a way to have his skills valued despite what other people might have to deal with regarding his personality. He's not always an ass, but he can be difficult. I'm quite sure that he's going to be lonely in the future, just like you, if he doesn't find friends able to cope with his most shiny traits.
OTOH, I'm the polar opposite, the complete loser, much like the stereotype of a fry-cook can come to be, and I have to say that being lonely as I am, I would trade places with you in heartbeat. While I don't inflict in other people and keep most things to myself, to have to deal with the minor incompetence of others in exchange to be completely isolated sounds great.
That sounds really awful. You've followed the recipe, gotten the killer career, the fat stacks, and the hot wife, and there you are, still miserable.
Please try your best not to read this as being condescending - I have a weakness for making valiant, often vain attempts at reaching out to and helping people who are miserable, because I've been there myself.
There's good news, and bad news.
The bad news is that the things that are supposed to make us happy are cultural constructs, illusions and soporifics that for whatever reason, fail completely to bring any happiness or meaning to the lives of people like you and me. We're born, we try feverishly and frantically to grab onto the happiness and meaning that seem to come so easily to others, and when we die it's a stillbirth - we've never really lived.
The good news (which may also sound kind of bad, depending on how you feel about certain things), is that humans throughout history have run up against this, and some of them have sat down and tried to solve the problem. Like all the best solutions, theirs were counter-intuitive, paradoxical to the ignorant, and easily mocked by those who had no need for them. These were of course the philosophers, mystics, and many of those who we think of today as religious figures. What they discovered was essentially the technology of human happiness.
I should stop to point out here that I'm not suggesting that you can fix your ASD stuff. What I am suggesting that it's not the proximate cause of your unhappiness. Sure, being excluded and lonely may be the result of your condition, but lots of people have that experience for other reasons and go on to lead happy lives. It's your reaction to your situation that's causing you pain.
I don't want to be prescriptive about where to start, but as intellectually appealing as philosophy might be, the bullshit to insight ratio is extremely high compared to what people generally refer to as spirituality or religion. Approaching the technology of happiness through Plato is a bit like trying to learn how to program by reading Turing's papers on computing - everything you need is theoretically there, but it's going to require a herculean effort before you can make software. It's better to revisit it once you have something that works in your life.
I'm not saying you have to believe in god, jesus, or magic. Some religious traditions leave these out entirely - for example in Buddhism offers an accessible path involving reincarnation, Bodhisattvas (saints), and miracles, and an alternative one in the Zen and Theravada traditions in which these things are taken as symbols rather than the signified. Buddhism is, to the best of my knowledge, the only religion in which this bifurcation is explicitly acknowledged, although some Christian and Muslim Neoplatonists constructed similar arguments that never became part of the broader doctrine.
Another commenter has suggested psychedelics. I've had earth shattering spiritual experiences on them, and I've also had less intense but much clearer and more lasting ones in the more traditional pursuit of understanding. YMMV.
Finally, if by some (figurative) miracle you've made it this far, it's important to note that learning about this stuff does nothing. You have to practice it, engage in it, and be changed by it. This is deeply fucking uncomfortable process, and it takes time. Best of luck.
I believe they're right about neurodiversity overall but that doesn't make a case for preventing gene editing so these people can better function in our society.
If you think about it, surely out of the counless gene variations possible in sexual reproduction some of them will most definitely be bad and even fatal.
In fact this happens all the time. The fact is that society is naturally tuned toward the average case and straying far in either direction usually causes a bad quality of life.
Humans have a tendency to mark everything as good or bad. Beautiful or ugly, smart or stupid. In reality everything is on a statistical distribution and for most traits you want to be in the middle. We shouldn't be breeding humans to live 20 years or 200, as a social species it's largely better to just correct the large outliers, even if it means losing our "geniuses"
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread(It was sort of a plot point in a Vernor Vinge novel. And Brave New World?)
It reminds me of a debugging technique I sometimes use, to prove to myself I understand a complex issue I try to make it worse. If I can then I almost certainly understand how to fix it too.
These are not the same thing and need different terms.
Or, even if they were in some sense fundamentally the same, is your argument that their effects are so practically different that they ought to be called by distinct names anyway?
As I understand it, there isn't even a consensus on any theory of what autism fundamentally is. Some theories try to explain the social issues as a lack of Theory Of mind, but these theories don't cover the many other symptoms typical of autism. One more recent theory ('Intense Worlds') does present a 'fundamental' explanation for all/most symptoms, but AFAIK it's not well-accepted or supported by evidence (yet), and the fact that it explains so much is also considered a drawback (too vague / overfitting / whatever the term is).
> Or, even if they were in some sense fundamentally the same, is your argument that their effects are so practically different that they ought to be called by distinct names anyway?
I've noticed that there seems to be a movement in treatment approach that focuses on treating individual symptoms without focusing too much on the overarching 'labels'. In my experience it's been a very nice, down to earth approach, and it strikes me as more measurable too. This approach strikes me as particularly useful for autism because there's so much variation between different autists and the particular symptoms they exhibit.
As a result we're hearing the phrase "somewhere on the spectrum" for any number of behaviors we don't see fitting the norm, and the reality of autism is not this "beautiful mind" scenario for many, but instead a crippling illness like the AP mentions. They are definitely not the same thing to the people who live with them.
The article is completely centered around the media image that autism creates geniuses, and that's a dangerous, misleading idea at best. The reality of living with it is usually much more ugly. Children who often become grown adults who can't make connections between cause and effect violently lashing out, throwing feces, biting care givers, screaming, screaming, and more screaming.
We should absolutely keep looking for ways to prevent and try to treat/cure it, and not act like everything is fine and great and accept it as diversity, for the sake of those who can't live normally.
Beneath superficial success and contribution, my life is a nonstop Munchian scream. I find it less insulting when people say everyone on the spectrum should be exterminated, than when people say some of us should be allowed to continue existing because our particular end of the spectrum happens to write pretty code / invent pretty theorems / etc.
While it's not important enough for genetic engineering on it's own, I'd probably edit my children to be darker. Having spent a few days on the beach in Thailand, the genetic inferiority of my own fair skin is quite visible and painful.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved...
It is reasonable to think that there the significant drawbacks associated with that hacked-together solution are no longer necessary because modern diets easily give adequate vitamin D.
Oh, and also in this ridiculousness I was quickly caught up in a logical fallacy, but no, no "that's not what I'm saying."
crude adaptation
Who are to you to say what adaption is and isn't crude?
It is reasonable to think that there the significant drawbacks associated with that hacked-together solution
Uh yeah, highly doubtful
https://i.redd.it/iwhuv6wyklgx.png
And once again, how is pale skin a "hack-together solution" in some way all the other countless biological adaptations aren't?
Some aspects of cultural, ethnic and religious identity are associated with and expressed by genetic factors like skin color.
For African Americans, just to give an example, the premise of "editing" children to be "whiter" might appear to enable racial genocide.
It doesn't apply only to skin color - some deaf people would consider genetically engineering away deafness an attack on "deaf culture."
But with what you describe as "genocide," not a single person is harmed. To me, an African American person has the same intrinsic value as a white person or anyone else. Therefore, I can't see any particular reason why I should care if we have more or fewer African Americans in the world.
I'm familiar with the argument made by deaf people. But those advocates never seem to address the reversal argument; why shouldn't we also produce new deaf people (e.g. by sedating some children and painlessly puncturing their eardrums) in pursuit of this goal?
It's not a rational way of thinking, but it is common.
Your argument is merely a straw man that left wing types smugly create and then dismiss to portray those they disagree with as stupid.
Yellow-skinned Africans would still be Africans, purple-skinned Asians would still be Asians, and green-skinned Europeans would still be Europeans.
When Obama was first running, there were discussions about whether or not he was "black enough" to really represent African American culture as President. Part of that was because of his upbringing (because, unfortunately, there is the perception that being educated, well spoken and wealthy is somehow antithetical to "true blackness") but part of it was the lightness of his skin color. It would have likely been easier for some people to accept his "white" background if he'd been physically darker.
You yourself correlated European with "white" in an earlier (probably still flagged) comment, so you know that references to skin color can seem intrinsic to many things to which it doesn't really apply.
Is this like reductio ad absurdum of PC signalling? Where do you spend the other 362 days of the year? In an environment that fair skin provides advantages for things like vitamin D production perhaps?
I find it very entertaining to be accused of PC signalling a few days after being accused of white supremacy.
https://pixabay.com/p-199674/?no_redirect
https://tonycavanagh.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/5005.jpg
Hardly a big difference. For genetic modification, the best solution is to increase range of tanning rather than changing the constant. It's already possible to get black skin [0] with eg. melanotan-2, so it's not that big of a change.
[0] http://imgur.com/a/I428E
Similarly, I'd like them to be born intelligent and naturally athletic.
"It is evident that as much as 69%-82% of the South Asian populations in India had 25(OH)D levels in plasma less than the minimum acceptable levels of 20 ng/ml"
Skin colors evolved when most people were outside for the entire day. Now the opposite is true.
[0] http://www.pjms.com.pk/issues/octdec208/article/reviewarticl...
Not all of us have your superpower :) I've managed to tan 1/32 of my summers.
Like, I think taking some hormones can make one's skin produce more melanin .
Idk if one has to keep taking it or not to keep it up, but from the pictures it looked fairly thorough.
Tbh I was also just mentioning what I mentioned because I thought it was amusing/interesting/novel or uh, thought it would look good to mention or something
What you mentioned was amusing
http://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
If I recall, the main premise was that new parents could choose to give their children a neurodevelopmental drug that would cause vastly increased intellectual prowess at the cost of gradually losing their connection to human society to the point of indecipherability.
I think it was a bit heavy-handed. But maybe I'm not remembering the story correctly.
The publicly condemned sadistic murderer, might be a perfectly adapted model-citizen for a society that wents savage every second generation.
The schizoid paranoid might be have been a model citizen in society ravaged by disease and bubonic plague, forming hate-filled sub-communitys, who would purge outsiders and self-quarantine.
The sexual-deviant might have been a model citizen in a society that had no real justice system, by being forced to uphold basic social contracts.
Autism would be a attempt of evolution to develop reliable automation and mass production in a medieval society in need of it.
All of this of course has to be "triggered" somehow, so there would be a feedback loop of mothers in the making, that create with the society they perceive, the counter measure of tomorrow. Have strife and stress? Next generation will have more psychopaths that see your genetic lottery ticket through that. Have a disease like the anti-baby-pill?
Lots of paranoid schizophrenic that want humanity to retreat into gated community.
Of course non of this is written in stone, it is always how nature turned out by supply and demand. What we make of this, is completely open to debate, but it has to be made upon a foundation of well researched knowledge, not upon a wishing well.
For instance (reflecting on your examples) it should be obvious to us that the word 'crime' meant something much narrower several thousand (or hundred) years ago.
It's a paradox in that it's nearly impossible to appreciate the value of neurodiversity until you build a close relationship with such a person.
My cousin Tony with Downs's would have most likely been aborted decades ago if a test were available. What no one knew is that he would become so kind, good natured, and socialable it would bring incredible joy and love to literally hundreds of family members and friends. There won't be too many like him from now on: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/22/downs-syndrome-pe...
The paradox is that most families with Autistic or Down's children would tell you their lives have been greatly enriched. To outsiders it sounds like parents are in denial and blinded to their child's predicament. But it's not denial or sympathy, the value is beautiful, but invisible until you experience it.
Maybe the people I know are not good representation of the population, though!
I'm pretty sure that's a minority though. I'm involved in an organization where I interact with lots of ASD families and anecdotally at least there are not many regrets.
The best way I know to explain it is this: http://www.our-kids.org/Archives/Holland.html
Lots of _talk_ in the school system about acceptance and anti-bullying, but I think our society has never been so intolerant of the diversity it claims to covet.
(We switched schools and things are much better now.)
A friend mentioned his son is a bit "Aspy" - he said it with a bit of pride in his voice. Both father and son are brilliant coders.
Meanwhile, there's Modafinil. Originally intended as a treatment for narcolepsy, others use it to improve concentration.
I wonder if neuro-configurability will lead to less or more diversity?
It's a pity because we will be less likely to ever become something we can't already imagine.
The desire of mankind to control everything is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
The combinatoric explosion of interactions between new "control technologies" alone will introduce many new, unforeseen variables.
The world will still be uncontrollable in new unforeseen ways.
Almost every human has the ability to learn and speak language, which is unique to mankind. (What media often reports as an animal language is not a language in that it doesn't have recursion -- the ability to handle it is, Chomsky and his supporters believe, unique to humans)
But shortly after language was born, in the very first stage of evolution of language, there must have been significant percentage of people who could not learn language. Where did they go? The answer is: they went extinct, failing to reproduce. And that's why we all can learn and speak language. The ancestors of us are those who could speak it. By making it difficult to reproduce for those who couldn't speak language, through the process of natural selection, we managed to build society where almost all of the members can speak it. Having autism in this era is analogous to being non-verbal in the early stage of humans.
With that said, endorsing diversity seems to be denial of evolution to me, denial of how we have come this far. It is by putting selection pressure on those who cannot adapt to society. And the sad reality is, you cannot stop it from happening. Autistic people will go extinct, even without the gene-editing technology, just like non-verbal people went extinct.
The association of evolution with "unalloyed good" seems like a mistake to me, and this mistake seems potentially connected to Hegelianism.
There's a whole spectrum of people, one end which defines large parts of society, the plain average. On the other end are people whose minds are so distorted relative to the norm that it's impossible for them to function in our society. I would put the blame for that on society not being diverse or open enough.
It seems to me that evolution works because of diversity: an organism diversifies through mutations to the point where one type gets an advantage over the others and survives. Think of it this way: If you limit yourself to what you already know, you'll be turning in circles, constantly reaching the same conclusions for the same problems. Let some outside knowledge/factors mess things up and you'll be able to move on.
Once it's understood, I don't think it's going to disappear: positive forms of it (ie. milder Asperger's) are going to become a niche option for parents, along with high iq edits of course. The 'little Einstein' option on a menu.
If I could go back and start over without the disease, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant sacrificing all that success and being a fry-cook all my life.
Someone at work invites me to a party. I go, I have fun. I never get invited again. New person gets hired, pattern repeats. Reliable as a clock.
My wife? I picked her up using techniques from the seduction community, which I studied like a science and practiced for over a year. I did that because I was tired of being a virgin, now I hate this relationship and feel powerless to escape it. BTW, during that seduction community time I spent endless hours at bars and clubs, surrounded by people having fun and pretending to have fun myself. I never had any fun there. It was more of a war zone which I tolerated in pursuit of a goal.
At work I feel like the mythical Cassandra, cursed to see the future but no-one will believe you. (I'm a programmer, of course.) I wish I could just treat it like a job that doesn't matter, and that it wouldn't physically pain me when some idiot can't even follow in-house variable-naming conventions, etc.
Sure, I guess I can't be 100% certain that fry-cooks aren't in their own screaming hell, just like I can't be 100% sure I'm not living in Plato's cave. But I think that's pretty fucking academic compared to the above things which I can be sure of.
I would not advise you to act as neurotypical but to seek out your own kind. That might not be easily found in collected pools of humans but to take a leaf out of the Major's book: 'The net is vast and infinite.'
How many of us have mentioned an obscure topic in passing on HN, and then been surprised by an erudite observation? Of course this does not always prevail, but it happens with enough frequency that I am convinced for each person there are companions.
To be less academic, if there are conventions for furries, then there are places in the world for you too!
It is frequently noted that geeks do much better at themed events with a purpose than at generic social outings. Less night club, more book club. The more object oriented the activity, the easier geeks get along. If you've been to a Hackerspace you'll know there is a wide range of interesting people at such places.
P.S. Every line cook I've known does claim to be in their own screaming hell.
Regarding parties, if you want to make yourself social, try MDMA with selegiline. Selegiline is to prevent MDMA from being neurotoxic [0].
>BTW, during that seduction community time I spent endless hours at bars and clubs, surrounded by people having fun and pretending to have fun myself. I never had any fun there. It was more of a war zone which I tolerated in pursuit of a goal.
You weren't alone. Most, if not all, men go to clubs in hope of getting laid. Those that have fun find the whole process fun; a game. They are the most extroverted ones so it may seem like it's the normal way to spend free time, but in reality they're a small minority. Nothing weird with not liking it, or not getting along with those that like it.
>I did that because I was tired of being a virgin
Literally, or do you mean combined with being single? If literally, why all that work on seduction instead of paying a prostitute?
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17881526
OTOH, I'm the polar opposite, the complete loser, much like the stereotype of a fry-cook can come to be, and I have to say that being lonely as I am, I would trade places with you in heartbeat. While I don't inflict in other people and keep most things to myself, to have to deal with the minor incompetence of others in exchange to be completely isolated sounds great.
Please try your best not to read this as being condescending - I have a weakness for making valiant, often vain attempts at reaching out to and helping people who are miserable, because I've been there myself.
There's good news, and bad news.
The bad news is that the things that are supposed to make us happy are cultural constructs, illusions and soporifics that for whatever reason, fail completely to bring any happiness or meaning to the lives of people like you and me. We're born, we try feverishly and frantically to grab onto the happiness and meaning that seem to come so easily to others, and when we die it's a stillbirth - we've never really lived.
The good news (which may also sound kind of bad, depending on how you feel about certain things), is that humans throughout history have run up against this, and some of them have sat down and tried to solve the problem. Like all the best solutions, theirs were counter-intuitive, paradoxical to the ignorant, and easily mocked by those who had no need for them. These were of course the philosophers, mystics, and many of those who we think of today as religious figures. What they discovered was essentially the technology of human happiness.
I should stop to point out here that I'm not suggesting that you can fix your ASD stuff. What I am suggesting that it's not the proximate cause of your unhappiness. Sure, being excluded and lonely may be the result of your condition, but lots of people have that experience for other reasons and go on to lead happy lives. It's your reaction to your situation that's causing you pain.
I don't want to be prescriptive about where to start, but as intellectually appealing as philosophy might be, the bullshit to insight ratio is extremely high compared to what people generally refer to as spirituality or religion. Approaching the technology of happiness through Plato is a bit like trying to learn how to program by reading Turing's papers on computing - everything you need is theoretically there, but it's going to require a herculean effort before you can make software. It's better to revisit it once you have something that works in your life.
I'm not saying you have to believe in god, jesus, or magic. Some religious traditions leave these out entirely - for example in Buddhism offers an accessible path involving reincarnation, Bodhisattvas (saints), and miracles, and an alternative one in the Zen and Theravada traditions in which these things are taken as symbols rather than the signified. Buddhism is, to the best of my knowledge, the only religion in which this bifurcation is explicitly acknowledged, although some Christian and Muslim Neoplatonists constructed similar arguments that never became part of the broader doctrine.
Another commenter has suggested psychedelics. I've had earth shattering spiritual experiences on them, and I've also had less intense but much clearer and more lasting ones in the more traditional pursuit of understanding. YMMV.
Finally, if by some (figurative) miracle you've made it this far, it's important to note that learning about this stuff does nothing. You have to practice it, engage in it, and be changed by it. This is deeply fucking uncomfortable process, and it takes time. Best of luck.
If you think about it, surely out of the counless gene variations possible in sexual reproduction some of them will most definitely be bad and even fatal.
In fact this happens all the time. The fact is that society is naturally tuned toward the average case and straying far in either direction usually causes a bad quality of life.
Humans have a tendency to mark everything as good or bad. Beautiful or ugly, smart or stupid. In reality everything is on a statistical distribution and for most traits you want to be in the middle. We shouldn't be breeding humans to live 20 years or 200, as a social species it's largely better to just correct the large outliers, even if it means losing our "geniuses"
* dark skin when we want it (for practical reasons or style)
* stripey zebra skin (just for this week, it's a novelty)
* genetic tattoos (program your skin to make tattoos of your design)
* cuttlefish skin, glowing jellyfish skin (for parties)
* change eye/hair color to match our clothes when going out
* change mental processing style for exams, getting jobs, learning languages (this week I'm autistic)