As someone who is pro-choice, it seems like a total non-sequitur. In that case, a person would be screwing around with what the fetus will be post-viability. Then again, a lot of Caplan's reasoning has never seemed totally together to me.
I do not like the idea of playing God with humanity's genetic make-up. I get the feeling that such genetic engineering would done for the benefit of research or parents instead of children themselves. It's funny because libertarian premises could lend itself easily to a worldview that is okay with the central conflict in The Island.
I've always loved the opening narration from Gone Baby Gone: "I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they'd accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those."
People who think they can choose everything put themselves permanently at odds with reality.
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Have you seen Bryan Caplan's argument for genetic engineering? He says it's reproductive freedom.
ReplyDeleteI haven't. But I am not surprised.
DeleteAs someone who is pro-choice, it seems like a total non-sequitur. In that case, a person would be screwing around with what the fetus will be post-viability. Then again, a lot of Caplan's reasoning has never seemed totally together to me.
DeleteI do not like the idea of playing God with humanity's genetic make-up. I get the feeling that such genetic engineering would done for the benefit of research or parents instead of children themselves. It's funny because libertarian premises could lend itself easily to a worldview that is okay with the central conflict in The Island.
I've always loved the opening narration from Gone Baby Gone: "I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they'd accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those."
ReplyDeletePeople who think they can choose everything put themselves permanently at odds with reality.
Good movie.
Delete