Let's try to fix the world's vast number of actual, boring health problems before trying to add the equivalent of spoilers and chrome-plated hubcaps to perfectly healthy human bodies.
The amount of people who can actually work on anything meaningful in this field is double-digit at best. Sure, if you add up "many different things" you have plenty of people who can work on plumbing, programming, and gene editing. What are you going to do for geneCAD? Right, absolutely nothing. It doesn't matter how many of you there are; you could be 8000 million or 8000 trillion people and still accomplish nothing.
This assumes things are static. There are millions of programmers now, but certainly weren't 100 years ago.
The tools to investigate this will get cheaper and easier, driving more people into the field hoping for the next big win, a big payout, or just to make an impact.
Anyone can make a small circuit design have have a fab print it for you. The same could happen here, all you need to do is provide the sequence
I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, so I already become someone else all the time...
In all seriousness, at times I do genuinely wish species transition were possible. Imagine gender dysphoria but for species, so species dysphoria. It may sound insane, but honestly so can the entire concept of dissociative identities.
I don't know if I'd want to change my brain, but the physical properties of the body definitely. I want the body to be a fluffy quadruped...
Thank you for the link though, that is very interesting. It is intuitive, but not something that normally comes to mind~
I didn't feel like fully explaining. Still, foxes and wolves and cats and so on are all fluffy quadrupeds and something like that is what I feel I would rather the body be.
It is the very definition of insane. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have sympathy for it, but it's important to recognise when certain aspects of our psyche isn't sane or good and accept that.
I never meant to claim it's good or sane that I want an animal body, but it's something I can't really help. I don't have the delusion that it's ever actually going to happen, I just can't help but wish that it would.
Yes, those are very similar. I occasionally use the term otherkin for myself, as a non-specific term for "one who identifies differently from the body", but I do tend to get along well with therians. (And queer people in general, I suppose.)
That's true if we assume unlimited resources and equal awareness/perceived social value of the two applications. But I think the former doesn't hold, and the latter is greatly influenced by sites like HN, where I'm disappointed to consistently (if not exclusively) see breathless proposals for ways to design shinier hubcaps whenever some promising new technology appears.
Yes, they can and likely will both happen to some extent, but I think they aren't independent, so I feel justified in trying to nudge the public conversation back towards the issues that I think matter more.
In all likelihood if we were to get to the point of it being safe and cheap enough for genetic engineering cosmetic "upgrades" then that would through economies of scale drive enough money that medical research funding would be a solved problem. Also anyone wanting the chrome pipes and spoilers package is going to want their engine tuned. Whats the point of having functional wings if you heart blows out trying to use them.
Cosmetic surgery for vanity has helped improve the techniques and procedures and even the number of skilled practitioners that can then help those with disfigurements and deformities.
Economies of scale. Shiny hubcap manufacturers will very generously subsidise the R&D for other, more worthy users of a technology. They aren't competitive or independent, they're synergistic. The billions of dollars we "wasted" on making video games look more realistic gave us a revolution in high-performance computing that nobody could have created intentionally.
That's due to a lack of theory and useful abstractions in the tools used to modify genes. We're so early on in the development of that field that if this were computers, we'd still be assembling devices by arranging logic gates by hand. Custom cosmetic gene therapy is a great way to incentivize the better tools.
> breathless proposals for ways to design shinier hubcaps whenever some promising new technology appears
I wouldn't underestimate the emotional toil of dealing with illness and death [1].
Tackling these problems head on requires (a) exposing researchers to that toil and (b) removing from the pool anyone who doesn't want to do that. Given how much of Silicon Valley culture is built on borderline-ludicrous optimism (once it's over the border it no longer qualifies as building), it makes sense that the indirect approach finds resonance here in a way the direct one does not.
Where your argument finds ample purchase is in the asymmetry of idiot luxury spending in our society to basic and applied research of any kinds, wings or Wilm's tumour.
Moreover, they are at this stage the exact same problem- requiring not competing but identical research: we need to understand generally how biology works enough to predictably engineer it.
> they are at this stage the exact same problem- requiring not competing but identical research
I'd go one step further in arguing they're complementary. The personalities that will work on e.g. wings or longevity are not the types drawn to curing diseases, much less the boring ones.
Broadening the field from solving mundane problems to solving daring ones is net positive. You gain personalities that would have otherwise stayed away. (You see something similar in space programmes.)
And a huge part of what steered talented people into programming over biomedicine was the relative freedom. The more you can do without the drag of convincing a vast bureaucratic/political machine to let you try your idea, the more people will contribute to progress.
it certainly reads as one, and calling them "most important" reveals your bias that those uses are more important too.
Like it or not, the way society is currently arranged, making stuff for rich people is more profitable than making things for poor people, and greed can kick in, so people do things out of love of money rather than necessity. were the deck stacked more equal, maybe things would be different, but human psychology is devilishly complex.
Most of those problems in the US are caused by lifestyle, and can't really be changed without behavioral modification. And a lot of our health issues are a matter of poor access to healthcare.
This assumes that the fundamental nature of human beings can't be changed, which is the presupposition that genetic engineering denies.
The entire point of genetic engineering is to try to engineer people at the cellular level. A fanciful example would be modifying human metabolism to be more similar to those of birds that consume most of their calories in the form of simple sugars. Humans can't eat a diet of 100% sugar and remain healthy, but other animals can. It may be possible to change that fact, if we know how to edit our genes.
Are you saying you could see sugar being somehow folded into the many different proteins that make up the vast number of tissues in our bodies. Or are you saying our tissues could be constructed out of sugar crystals instead?
Proteins can be synthesized from sugar as a carbon source. We know this because there are bacteria that can survive and reproduce with no nutrients in their environment other than glucose.
In fact you don’t even need sugar. Carbon dioxide and water alone are sufficient. Plants produce their entire biomass using nothing but carbon dioxide, water, sunlight and trace elements from soil.
Amino acids and proteins don’t occur without life. Living creatures have the ability to synthesize all amino acids and proteins from simpler compounds.
Sex changes/gender transitions is an actual boring health problem. The inability to assume the correct gender for a trans person often leads to social rejection, violence, poverty, prostitution, murder, and suicide.
It seems pretty clear to me that changing one’s body is preferable to changing who you are. The former is something you’re born with, but the latter is something you can decide for yourself.
Suppose, as you do, that your body is not who you are. Then your identity lies solely in your brain. But if that's the case why would disphoria even exist?
If you feel like a man but you don't look like a man, why could that cause any identity problems? It must mean your body is actually part of your identity, so changing it changes who you are
The problem with this argument is that it leads to the conclusion that all change is pointless. If your body is who you are, and you can’t control it, then it’s best just to accept whatever you’re given.
That’s contrary to most of human history, where we specifically try not to take what we’re dealt.
It’s useful to ask yourself: why should vaccines be "allowed" (or "accepted" or "they’re good") but body change shouldn’t be? They’re both as artificial as a Twinkie.
Cutting off body parts to treat body dysphoria is something that should be done with great care and rarely leads to solving the underlying mental problems.
Trans is a much discussed variant that is hard to have a normal talk about, but there are many more variants, for instance women hating their breast & wanting to remove them, I think most people here would agree that intensive psychological treatment are preferable to actually removing healthy body parts. But in the end an adult can do what they want.
Erasing someone's dysphoria would also fundamentally change their identity and personality. If I were to suffer a head injury today that so altered my personality, the result would be very unpredictable. I could become a better person, or a worse one. I could lose my wife, my career, everything. But even if the outcome were positive, I wouldn't be me anymore. This me would cease to exist, replaced by a new one.
On the other hand, a bodily alteration is much more predictable, and, importantly, I'd still be me. I wouldn't become some other person.
This me has an instinct for self-preservation. Thus, if both options were available, I would absolutely choose transition over erasure.
You seem to come from the point of view that body and mind are quite separate, and that changing your body through surgery and hormones and other chemicals has less effects on the "real you" than a change in brain wiring would cause.
