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[Realmfighter]

1: Yes.

Why.

2: You literally answered the question in the same sentence.

Focus does not imply that every other desire has been removed and replaced, only that they have been overshadowed by the desire being focused on.

3: Because someone who likes sitting on a couch drinking beer is a complex person full of lots of desires and ideas and potential. Which they then chose to use on being happy sitting on a couch drinking beer. I would be just as unhappy with someone being forced to sit on a couch and drink beer as anything else.

But people created to desire productivity wouldn't be forced to do so, except in the most abstract way possible. Why would they be intrinsically less complex? What part of this theoretical process would be impossible without destroying all other possible desires excluding productivity?

[Criptfeind]

Why.

Because more choice is a good thing.

Focus does not imply that every other desire has been removed and replaced

Yes it does.

But people created to desire productivity wouldn't be forced to do so, except in the most abstract way possible. Why would they be intrinsically less complex? What part of this theoretical process would be impossible without destroying all other possible desires excluding productivity?

Your 'most abstract way possible' is still way way more concrete then we currently are. It's still taking the choice out of it. The less complexity is because they have less complex choices. As in no choice at all.

As for what part of it is impossible without destroying all other possible desires excluding productivity. That's the real fucking rub right there. Is because it is not impossible. It's certainly possible. But it's also possible to do it with destroying all other possible desires excluding productivity. And the thing is. That's a mistake you can't make twice.

[Realmfighter]

Because more choice is a good thing.

I am still failing to see how a life full of suffering but with many exciting new ways to experience pain is better than a pleasant life with few opportunities to chose.

Yes it does.

So someone dedicated to their job, but unaltered using our theoretical modification machine can desire other things than success in their profession, but an altered person doesn't? You even admit it's possible three lines down!

Your 'most abstract way possible' is still way way more concrete then we currently are. It's still taking the choice out of it. The less complexity is because they have less complex choices. As in no choice at all.

What? No seriously, how do you get from someone altered to be more productive to Mindless drone? If complexity is the most desirable thing then why not glorify madness, because what worse constraint of free thought is there but logic?

As for what part of it is impossible without destroying all other possible desires excluding productivity. That's the real fucking rub right there. Is because it is not impossible. It's certainly possible. But it's also possible to do it with destroying all other possible desires excluding productivity. And the thing is. That's a mistake you can't make twice.

We're already in Science Christmasland. Changing someone's personality is a lot more unreasonable than doing it right if we already had the capability. And besides, we could easily do person by person testing until we got it right.

[Loud Whispers]

Because more choice is a good thing.

I am still failing to see how a life full of suffering but with many exciting new ways to experience pain is better than a pleasant life with few opportunities to chose.

It's more fulfilling than a life you have so little to do with full of decadence for one. Life is more than optimizing pleasure versus pain.

[Criptfeind]

I am still failing to see how a life full of suffering but with many exciting new ways to experience pain is better than a pleasant life with few opportunities to chose.

I am still failing to see how you think those are the only two choices. Why not say. A happy life with choice? How about that?

If complexity is the most desirable thing then why not glorify madness, because what worse constraint of free thought is there but logic?

Because madness does not empower you to make choices. It makes you unable to understand the choices you have. Hell. What the fuck is the difference between being modified to 'chose' 'the wrong choice' and madness making you chose 'the wrong choice'?

So someone dedicated to their job, but unaltered using our theoretical modification machine can desire other things than success in their profession, but an altered person doesn't? You even admit it's possible three lines down!

What? No seriously, how do you get from someone altered to be more productive to Mindless drone?

We're already in Science Christmasland. Changing someone's personality is a lot more unreasonable than doing it right if we already had the capability. And besides, we could easily do person by person testing until we got it right.

(I lumped these three together because I feel they depend on the same thing.)

I think this might be the point of contention here. Who the fuck are you talking about when you say We?

This is a science Christmasland. I understand the point of this conversation is "What if humanity could control human genetics?"

But did I miss the part of the conversation that changed it to "What if only perfectly moral people who could perfectly predict the consequences of their actions with the well-being of everyone in mind could control human genetics?"

I mean. That's not a really interesting conversion. But if that is what you want. Fine.

[Eagleon]

I can say with qualitative certainty that making people 'like being productive' (and through genetics, of all things, not even behavior modification) is impossible. Unless what you want from them could also be done by giant motorized carrots. Boredom, stress, and fatigue are huge (overall positive) parts of learning and behavior, you can't just decrease them without major consequences during development. If you want to introduce new instinctual behaviors, good luck - many of the instincts we have now are as fundamental and deep rooted in our genetics as our spinal column.

I mean, yeah, I suppose if you could somehow instill a deep-rooted desire to handle paper and telephone-like objects, those might make better accountants, but you have the tangle of the rest of the brain overriding harmful behavior at every turn, so it might actually turn into an aversion. If you really want better worker-drones, just throw them in Skinner boxes and get it over with.

[DJ]

Wait, what? Humans are nowhere near the top speed bracket in the African savannah. I thought the advantage of bipedalism is that it's more energy efficient. If there's one thing that's useful on short distances it's our manoeuvrability, being able to jump sideway like we can is great for dodging.

"Short distances" were the key words (50m or less).  Humans can accelerate faster than most other animals even if the top speed is lower.

That still doesn't look right to me. Big cats, being ambush predators, are all about acceleration. And big cats are what you really need to outrun in our native environment, so the prey animals would be optimized for acceleration as well.

[Trollheiming]

I can say with qualitative certainty that making people 'like being productive' (and through genetics, of all things, not even behavior modification) is impossible.

I like being productive. I think you'll find there are many guys that like their jobs. And some women, too.

"Short distances" were the key words (50m or less).  Humans can accelerate faster than most other animals even if the top speed is lower.

That still doesn't look right to me. Big cats, being ambush predators, are all about acceleration. And big cats are what you really need to outrun in our native environment, so the prey animals would be optimized for acceleration as well.

Completely backward, in fact. Humans are fastest over long distances. Our hunting strategy was to pursue and track herds for miles, rather than catch a few in a burst. Quite often, our ancestors would channel entire herds into a killing field, say for example, into a marsh or a tar pit. The average human was a marathon runner, not a sprinter, and the feats that we can do in endurance activities still compare favorably against the feats of animals in the wild, even in our modern degenerate state of civilization.

That's an issue here. Has anyone considered that our ancestors were better than us in every way? Yes. Even intellectually. We have a larger knowledge base to build new advances upon, and a large pool of varied humanity from which to recruit a shockingly small sliver of truly effective researchers. (Most research is self-indulgent trash.) Having access to the breakthroughs of the past, and access to a few people unlike the rest of us, is not the same as having accomplished everything around us ourselves. Right now, we think we're smarter on average than ever before in mankind simply because we can type broken english into our iPhones. Pushing buttons designed to mask far more complicated systems isn't very hard, actually, and it's what most of us excel at. We've leveraged the ability to breed 7 billion people and use the smartest 700,000 accidental geniuses to create more simple button-operated things for us to use, but if we fell back into hunter-gatherer groups of 40 self-reliant people, everyone in that group would have to have a minimum level of intelligence that's arguably much higher than average modern people. There's no button to start a fire with two sticks, or know how to chip flint tools. I think a caveman can grasp the concept of "pushing a button" better than most people can grasp the concept of "fried chicken comes from an animal I have to kill"

Idiocracy, which I watched for the first time thanks to the verboten mention, puts that mankind is right now at a peak of intellect from which it's just beginning a descent, but it's more likely that we've been descending for thousands of years already. The dysgenic pressure started the first time grains were cultivated.

[Scoops Novel]

Whatever though. I'm not really worried about it too much, since as you say impoverished nations already suck, and they may not actually get worse. So who cares. I don't really care about them.

And that is why i wondered why we were making this thread.

[Frumple]

Love to see where you've hid the time machine that let you go back and measure intelligence and general capability during the pre-agrarian era, T, for all that the tangent in question is mostly irrelevant to the thread. I guess it's good to see that ancestor worship's still strong in the modern era?

[Trollheiming]

Love to see where you've hid the time machine that let you go back and measure intelligence and general capability during the pre-agrarian era, T, for all that the tangent in question is mostly irrelevant to the thread. I guess it's good to see that ancestor worship's still strong in the modern era?

I hid the time machine in a CostCo. I'm just saying you should consider it.

[Frumple]

Well, I like a good fantasy story more than most, but... that's all that lil'pseudo-science (not even that, really ) spiel was, y'know? Pretty much entirely unverifiable and unsupportable, pure speculation with basically no foundation in anything even resembling fact. Without some sort of support (which is pretty much impossible to produce unless a fellow's got some sort of time machine or some degree of historical records [of a sort which we lack]), the only reason I'd have to consider it as a meaningful (sorta') explanation would be if I were trying to support some other position with (baseless) just-so stories, which... I'm not, really.

S'an interesting enough example of spinning a yarn, but that sort of thing being presented as serious is one of the reasons the anthropology field gets laughed so much. Which kinda' makes me sad when I see it, as I'd love for the study to find itself a niche that isn't covered by psychology or sociology (and for it to get off philosophy's lawn ).

[Wayward Device]

Wait, what? Humans are nowhere near the top speed bracket in the African savannah. I thought the advantage of bipedalism is that it's more energy efficient. If there's one thing that's useful on short distances it's our manoeuvrability, being able to jump sideway like we can is great for dodging.

"Short distances" were the key words (50m or less).  Humans can accelerate faster than most other animals even if the top speed is lower.

That still doesn't look right to me. Big cats, being ambush predators, are all about acceleration. And big cats are what you really need to outrun in our native environment, so the prey animals would be optimized for acceleration as well.

There's a recent video of floating around of an Olympic sprinter sprinter racing a thoroughbred Arab racehorse and winning. Hmm, just looking for the videos, there's a fair few of these and it's a well established thing. Here's the video I was originally thinking of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1L9McKLf38, its Oscar "Baderunner" Pistorius.

[Sheb]

I would also like the remember the assembly that breeding for a specific trait usually have unintended consequences. Racehorses are fast, but they get hurt easily. Genetic is complicated, and except for a few "easy" case (Like taking out the allelle responsible for Huntigton's disease), I don't think we can even decide which of two alleles is best.

[Sergius]

Humans are probably some of the weakest animals in history - no claws, no poison, slow, babies take too long to become not helpless. But because of this weakness, they mastered tools.

Wait what is this i don't even

I'm pretty sure that they started mastering tools as their brains got bigger, and then as they no longer needed a lot of stuff because of the tools, certain genes didn't become as important in reproduction (body fur, strong muscles) and others become more important (even bigger brains, which is what actually causes babies to be useless for so long... since they need to be ejected before their heads get too big, unlike animals who are born completely functional).

Why is this still being discussed? It's not as if we know enough about it to begin with, and things are already being ugly.

Translation: why are you guys here instead of one of the dozens of threads I've created?

the most basic hunting method for a human being is walking after a prey animal for a day or two, not letting it sleep or eat, then throwing rocks at it when it passes out;.

That probably evolved into this.

Wait, what? Humans are nowhere near the top speed bracket in the African savannah. I thought the advantage of bipedalism is that it's more energy efficient. If there's one thing that's useful on short distances it's our manoeuvrability, being able to jump sideway like we can is great for dodging.

"Short distances" were the key words (50m or less).  Humans can accelerate faster than most other animals even if the top speed is lower.

That still doesn't look right to me. Big cats, being ambush predators, are all about acceleration. And big cats are what you really need to outrun in our native environment, so the prey animals would be optimized for acceleration as well.

Bipeds have better acceleration *when starting from a complete stop*.

They're also better at like, turning. What good that did against larger predators I'm not sure, maybe we can be evasive that way or in case of us hunting, we can annoy our prey more? Just wanted to clear that up, it's not that we have better acceleration, period. It's just that we can go from zero to... 5? in about zero seconds, while it takes a couple of seconds for a quadruped to get there.

Has anyone considered that our ancestors were better than us in every way? Yes. Even intellectually. We have a larger knowledge base to build new advances upon, and a large pool of varied humanity from which to recruit a shockingly small sliver of truly effective researchers. (Most research is self-indulgent trash.) Having access to the breakthroughs of the past, and access to a few people unlike the rest of us, is not the same as having accomplished everything around us ourselves. Right now, we think we're smarter on average than ever before in mankind simply because we can type broken english into our iPhones. Pushing buttons designed to mask far more complicated systems isn't very hard, actually, and it's what most of us excel at.

Actually, the myth that currently people are dumber because it's easier for them to access information / do operations / use calculators has been debunked several times. What this does, actually, is free more time to invent new things, instead of spending effort on how to find the nth decimal of Pi every time we need it, or spending long hours at a library trying to find a tidbit of info we want.

It's the same logic that says that kids these days are dumber because they use their smartphones all day instead of reading books.