<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto">Providing people with choices, as Ben wants, doesn’t mean enforcing specific choices. It could be that most (or all?) people given maximum choice would still cluster around the same choice or at least similar choices. To use your example, with IQ, maybe all else being the same, everyone would choose the max here. (If all else is not the same, then trade offs enter the picture. Of course, in an uploading scenario, the trade offs will likely be radically different than the ones experienced now. Of course, right now, people don’t do much trading off between IQ and height or susceptibility to this or that genetic problem; they just happen. But people do trade off between, say, learning a foreign language and having more leisure.)<br><br><div dir="ltr"><div style="line-height: normal;"><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Regards,</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Dan</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> Sample my Kindle books at:</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><p style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">http://author.to/DanUst</span></p></div></div></div><div><div style="line-height: normal;"></div></div></div><div dir="ltr"><br><blockquote type="cite">On Mar 25, 2020, at 7:48 AM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org> wrote:<br><br></blockquote></div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">What justification can you come up with that results in people having different IQs, given that we can give everyone the maximum? Ditto for all health genes. How we we explain to a person that we could have made them better but we didn't? Tall people are favored in the job market. How could we explain to a short person that we just gave them this disadvantage?</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">Sure, there are plenty of factors that we can let go wild - parent's choice.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#000000">bill w</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 8:02 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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On 24/03/2020 21:32, billw wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"><font style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif" color="#888888">
I do think I would make everyone better in the same way</font></blockquote>
<br>
I'm certain you'd get a <i>lot</i> of resistance to that!<br>
<br>
Apart from anything else, this smacks of coercion. But also, it
leads to a monoculture, which is always a bad idea.<br>
<br>
Better to provide people with as wide a variety of choices as
possible imo. Let them decide for themselves, let them choose how
far to go, including nowhere at all, and what types of change to
choose.<br>
<br>
I'm pretty sure that if/when uploading became possible, it won't
lead to everyone being the same. Far from it, it would enable an
explosion of variety that would put the Cambrian to shame.<br>
<br>
<pre cols="72">--
Ben Zaiboc</pre>
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