Yeah it didn’t really occur to me that that was what I was advocating till a while after I had the idea.
But I do mention that it’s meant more as a proposal for a future scenario where eugenics(might be too strong/loaded a term) is considered acceptable or becomes inevitable because of competition between individuals. In that scenario it would be better to push heights down than up.
Still I think we should keep an open mind.
There might also be ways of reducing average height other than gene editing, which wouldn’t technically be eugenics I guess.
I think this is kind of the perennial problem for any nominally altruistic group. I’m not sure how you’d insure against it or how’d you’d even know if it was happening, but I definitely agree EA should at least acknowledge the potential problem having large sums of money and prestige flow through the organisation creates, more so than it currently does.
Personally I think Orwell was wrong that the Soviets’ main problem was Napoleons’ greed (don’t ask me what the real problem was), the semi-recently opened archives give pretty clear evidence that at least the members of the politburo where believers in their cause. So maybe corruption isn’t actually very common in real world altruistic organisations.