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Lears-Shadow t1_j89u0rp wrote

There's nothing wrong with positive eugenics, ie encouraging high quality people to breed and discouraging dysgenic breeding (eg incest or people with genetic disorders). What's wrong is negative eugenics, ie using state force to sterilise or punish people for it.

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Space_Pirate_Roberts t1_j8cld40 wrote

>There's nothing wrong with positive eugenics, ie encouraging high quality people to breed

Who gets to define "high quality people" and decide who measures up to the definition? Who checks their work to make sure they're being honest and objective? Who checks theirs?

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Lears-Shadow t1_j8d0di1 wrote

Right now for example the global IQ is decreasing for various factors, but one of them is high-IQ, educated women are less likely to have children. In a few generations, if this trend is not reversed, we will have a collapsing civilisation run by low IQ people who have no idea how to run the systems and technology that they've inherited from us. If you value civilisation, you may wish to reverse this trend. If you don't care then that's a different matter altogether. But for people who value civilisation, high quality traits are things like intelligence, social cohesion, physical health, mental health, co-operativeness, etc.

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Mustelafan t1_j8ean2d wrote

Selecting for cooperativeness sounds like a slippery slope to Orwellianism tbh

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BerkelMarkus t1_j8tgviy wrote

Have you tried dating?

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Mustelafan t1_j8tolnm wrote

Nope I'm too uncooperative

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BerkelMarkus t1_j8trnpr wrote

IDK if you're missing my point or just being flip (as I was) for internet points. But, on the off chance you missed the point, sexual selection selects for a ton of sociability traits.

So, unless you think sexual selection is Orwellian on its own, I'm not really sure what your point is.

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Mustelafan t1_j8v3v8h wrote

Sure but it's a bit different when it's the government doing the selecting.

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VitriolicViolet t1_j8unwmi wrote

>But for people who value civilisation, high quality traits are things like intelligence, social cohesion, physical health, mental health, co-operativeness, etc.

yeah no, 'values' like co-operativeness and social cohesion are not necessarily good things, too much of either and you get a docile population who will not use violence at all.

society is only as valuable as it treats its least and any given population must have the ability to violently tear down society if need be (it shouldnt be encouraged but to diminish the ability to is to all but guarantee dystopia)

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Amphy64 t1_j8v1058 wrote

I'd love to at least pass on my education and raise children to improve on it, but disabled women like me struggle dating, and while I wouldn't dream of blaming it for all my problems, on a societal level, it's partly because people are ableist eugenicists.

Also 'mental health' has come to mean shut up and put up, don't express 'toxic' dissatisfaction with the status quo, obligatory happiness, if you hate being underpaid or otherwise mistreated it's an individual problem, definitely don't be neurodivergent and want to burn the ableist status quo to the ground.

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AConcernedCoder t1_j89z7tr wrote

The interesting thing about it, is if you were to imagine yourself performing an experiment on the evolution of a population to determine which traits lend toward survivability, to simulate what you're proposing, the population within the constraints you defined, would in effect attempt to subvert the experiment by changing the constraints to suit its collective preferences. It would ruin the experiment in so far as you wouldn't have found those traits that improve survivability within constraints that matter, and given that we in the real world have no such controls over the real constraints that matter for the survivability of the human race, our own attempts to guide human evolution are similarly self-deluded, selfish and shortsighted. That having understanding of evolution somehow allows us to control our own evolution, seems to lead to a kind of contradiction wherein we seem to think that subverting evolution is evolution. It's fundamentally flawed.

I suppose none of that ultimately matters when there are untapped markets to explore with designer babies and what not. Or maybe it does, when at the end of the day, everything we do is factored into selection of the fittest whether we like it or not.

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forestwolf42 t1_j8a42yr wrote

I really like this use of the term "positive eugenics" to help distinguish it from the very negative associations with the worst kinds of eugenics.

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