What's your opinion on eugenics?

submitted by detty from self.AskSaidIt

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[–]weavilsatemyface 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

How can you get more intelligent, harder working people and end up worse?

Think about how much harm just one hard-working genus, Thomas Midgley, managed, and now imagine society had a hundred million of him.

Every awful invention was created by hard-working intelligent people.

  • The bankers that came up with the complex financial plans and the sub-prime mortgage scams that almost collapsed the western economies in 2008 were hard-working, intelligent people.
  • Intelligent, hard-working people re-created the 1918 Spanish Flu virus.
  • Intelligent, hard-working people spent years collecting bat viruses and then breeding them using gain of function experiments to make them more deadly and more infectious to humans in the very city where, purely coincidentally I am sure, Covid first appeared.
  • Intelligent, hard-working people invented the internet of shit. Some hard-working, intelligent person created a car and programmed it with the sentence “Road is too steep to start the installation” and thought "Job well done!".

I actually know people with IQs off the chart who are supposed to be really, really intelligent, and I'm not convinced that high intelligence is a survival trait.

High intelligence is a risk factor for many psychological and physiological disorders, including immune-system disorders and Aspergers/autism.

Very smart people tend to have much, much higher rates of mental illness, including anxiety, manic-depression, severe hypochondria, etc. Depression seems to be especially common. Often very smart people have severe personality flaws: one woman I know was used to calibrate the 200+ end of IQ scores, and she had literally no sense of humour at all. None. Could not understand the concept of "funny" at all.

It's hard to say whether sociopaths are more likely to be way above average intelligence, or whether the dumb psychopaths just get themselves killed or in jail very early. But either way, there does seem to be a correlation between being well above average in intelligence and being a sociopath/psychopath.

And of course, just because you're intelligent doesn't mean you won't act dumb. In some ways, intelligent people are the easiest to fool, or to fool themselves, because they are better at convincing themselves that what they want to be true is true even when it isn't.

only the top .1% of people actually do anything that advances society.

That's hilarious 😂 😂 😂

CC u/detty

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Every awful invention was created by hard-working intelligent people.

By that logic you should be Amish living in a cave, rejecting technology because it is evil.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Modern technology is only a few hundred years old, dating from the industrial revolution. Humans lived for 300 thousand years without even agriculture. We lived for maybe ten thousand years with hand-built technology. I doubt our species will survive even a thousand years with modern technology. We'll be lucky to make 500 years, and we're already more than halfway to that.

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

If you believed that you would not be on the internet.

The reality is that technology has stronger, safer, and more capable than ever before. We are further from extinction than we have ever been and the more we expand our understanding of the world the safer and more resilient we become.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Modern technology makes us more comfortable. I'm not unaware of the benefits of modern tech, and I personally wouldn't want to go back to medieval technology, because I like my comforts. I like having hot and cold running water, and electricity, and not having to do manual labour for a living.

But the cost is high, and getting higher. We use up resources, even renewable resources, faster than they can be renewed. On average, we use up a years worth of resources in about eight months. There are areas of the UK, not some third-world dump but the United frigging Kingdom, where the land is so poisoned by chemicals from mining that the run-off goes into people's drinking water and is giving children literal brain damage. How many years has it been and the world's richest country still has not fixed the water supply in Flint?

We're already seeing the collapse of fish populations. There are parts of the world where the oceans and now almost completely empty of fish due to over-fishing. We're breeding bacteria for antibiotic resistence because doctors overprescribe antibiotics, and because we pump our chickens full of them to make them grow faster.

Our best and brightest experiment with creating deadly viruses. Our food, water and air is contaminated with toxic "forever chemicals" that take hundreds or thousands of years to break down. There are microplastics in our brains, and crossing the placenta into embryoes. Microplastics are just one of literally hundreds of endocrine disrupters that fuck up our hormone systems, are probably linked to auto-immune diseases, and mess up our brains. You wonder why the rates of autism has exploded over the last few decades? Why were there almost no peanut allergies fifty years ago, and now peanut allergies are everywhere?

We look back at the ancient Romans using lead pipes and cooking in lead pots and putting on lead-based makeup and think "well no wonder the empire collapsed" and then we do the same only with thousands of chemicals and world-wide.

As for the internet... it's a fucking drug, and I am can resist anything but temptation. What's your excuse?

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Your absurd view on intelligence is easily destroyed by comparing societies with higher intelligence against those with lower intelligence.

But I am absolutely fine allowing you, and others like you, to suffer the consequences of your beliefs. I just want to be allowed the same right to suffer the consequences of mine. let me, and others like me, organize a parallel society that is allowed to implement eugenics policies. Let the results speak for themselves.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

comparing societies with higher intelligence against those with lower intelligence

That would be... human societies, compared to praire dogs?