Thank you for writing this, I find the idea very interesting.
Your argument against worrying about negative consequences didn’t pick me up.
What if increasing these supposedly positive traits results in negative consequences?
It’s important to avoid status quo bias. To quote Bostrom and Ord:
“Reversal Test: When a proposal to change a certain parameter is thought to have bad overall consequences, consider a change to the same parameter in the opposite direction. If this is also thought to have bad overall consequences, then the onus is on those who reach these conclusions to explain why our position cannot be improved through changes to this parameter. If they are unable to do so, then we have reason to suspect that they suffer from status quo bias.”
I take issue with the Reversal test because it seems very difficult to have a realistic picture of a world where a parameter like IQ is increased or decreased significantly. Therefore, the “status quo bias” might be a reasonable attitude if we have very little understanding of the dynamics of our system and there is little chance of reversing the intervention (e.g. you mention a slippery slope dynamic where once genetic enhancement is used everyone will more or less have to use it).
Imagine that I currently feel more or less content with the broad trends of humanity and would like to be very careful before supporting profound interventions like widespread availability of genetic enhancement.
Thank you for writing this, I find the idea very interesting.
Your argument against worrying about negative consequences didn’t pick me up.
I take issue with the Reversal test because it seems very difficult to have a realistic picture of a world where a parameter like IQ is increased or decreased significantly. Therefore, the “status quo bias” might be a reasonable attitude if we have very little understanding of the dynamics of our system and there is little chance of reversing the intervention (e.g. you mention a slippery slope dynamic where once genetic enhancement is used everyone will more or less have to use it).
Imagine that I currently feel more or less content with the broad trends of humanity and would like to be very careful before supporting profound interventions like widespread availability of genetic enhancement.