Comment by DoctorOetker
3 hours ago
> will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.
I think we both agree when I say I think RFK Jr. knows nearly nothing about biology or ethics, just like squirrels, possums, insects know nearly nothing about biology or ethics, as practically all species on Earth.
I certainly don't think he comprehends the zooko's triangle between:
1) egalitarian access to healthcare (if not just privatize?)
2) the level of healthcare (as measured by deviation from non-intervention procreation statistics: if you medically could remediate a cold to the point that my cold didn't cause me to stay inside, suffering in a bed, I might have seduced a mate and procreated, natural selection works on rates, not caricatural life vs death; if my procreation statistics were unchanged by the "remedy" against the cold, it can't have been very effective, as I assure you it would have improved my procreation rate if it were, but perhaps I may be wrong and most people might actually have more successful dates with mates suffering a cold then mates not suffering a cold)
3) the fitness of future generations
you can have 2 but not all 3; we can't bypass natural selection and then say it didn't have an influence on natural selection.
The concept of socialized healthcare without depriving the future generations of as fit a genome as humans had in a pre-socialized healthcare society is effectively impossible. Every healthcare intervention just sends the grim reaper to the next generation. By what right does the current generation exploit knowledge on biology for the medical comfort of that generation, at the cost of a more vurnerable future population, precisely more vulnerable where we "succeeded" in temporarily thwarting its side effects?
so when you write
> will result in a terrible price that some children will pay in the future.
That is true, but only in a myopic sense.
While the conclusion is controversial, the premises are not. As formal verification gets picked up, not just by programmers and hardware designers, but by society at large, these insights in the form of formal scientific proofs will be publicly and unambiguously known.
How did humanity end up in this situation? "Healthcare" was rarely a true act of charity, it served the King if a baby could be secured to safety by surgically removing it from his wife, it served the King if his armies practiced medicine which boosted morale and healed its soldiers, it served the King if doctors could specialize and treat patients on a regular basis, so they would have ready knowledge and experienced stable hands (systematically located by organizing a healthcare system) would be available to treat the King when eventually the King needed such experienced help himself.
All of these directional practices originated long before awareness let alone agreement on evolution theory.
There is no ethical nor effective way to turbocharge natural selection, so as a species we should not repeat the mistakes of the Nazi's. Socialized healthcare is unethical across generations. Gated access to healthcare is unethical on egalitarian grounds. Ineffective healthcare is unethical on the grounds of quackery.
Somewhere between being born and our current age, billions of people were and still are indoctrinated about some internally inconsistent putative ethical possibility of egalitarian access to healthcare, which was never proven, and plenty of evidence speaks to the contrary!
I think we both agree when I say I think RFK Jr. knows nearly nothing about biology or ethics, just like squirrels, possums, insects know nearly nothing about biology or ethics, as practically all species on Earth.
They don't need hospitals!
So keep the spiel about what may happen to children, because egalitarian healthcare will amplify every successfully treated affliction's incidence rates in the next generations!
Nobody is singularly powerful enough to stop the healthcare madness; if healthcare disappears it won't be due to RFK Jr. it will be because it will have gone out of style, and shrouded in shame, like doing a big poo poo on the carpet, stashed away as a traumatic collective memory, somewhere between Pol Pot and the Nazi's, that is the natural endpoint for the illusion of egalitarian healthcare without consequences.
Modern medicine saves lives. Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society. But you're suggesting that letting children die from preventable diseases is a bad thing. It's not.
> Of course natural selection doesn't fully apply anymore in our society.
It doesn't matter how authoritatively you state it, but wanting it not to matter is not the same as it not applying. It still applies modulo some distortion by "egalitarian healthcare". Every time you have a cold or whatever is a moment you are statistically less likely to reproduce. When a potential mate approaches you but sneezes all over itself, it has an influence on your attraction towards this mate. If only things were so simple as state them in a voice of authority...
Is it in the interest of the group, and of future children that they inherit deficiencies at higher rates simply because we apply healthcare?
What exactly is "civilized" about our healthcare behavior?
So what? Technology gives us free lunch after free lunch. And in the not so distant future we can just gene-edit our offspring, the ultimate free lunch.
There is a difference between technology and addiction, healthcare has never given a free lunch, it always came with this cost.
How about the following amended version: imagine healthcare can only treat people for an affliction if it ALSO treats the same person by gene-editing the same affliction away? or would you still support treatments for people when no gene-editing solution is known?
Suppose patients seek treatment but refuse gene-editing, should they be granted access to treatment? If they accept gene editing, how do we determine what a healthy genome looks like?
There is a hidden assumption in what you propose, you propose implicitly that the fitness function that implicitly scores us is analytically available to us. But we don't have access to this expression. Allow me to give a more clear example:
Sickle cell anemia: we understand which mutations result in it, and we could genetically modify it away as a disease.
But nature explores and tallies all explored options and constantly reweighs them. Nobody has a crystal ball predicting the future: perhaps global warming could result in malaria affecting the whole world, and in that case its the Sickle cell anemia afflicted that have an advantage, the same condition that gives them their medical complaints is the same condition that increases their resilience against malaria. If it didn't have any advantage ever it would be strange for those mutations to survive systematically in malaria mosquito regions...
We don't have access to the implicit fitness function, we can only explore it through living it. If we did have access to this implicit fitness function we could perform gradient descent on a computer, and egalitarian healtcare without negative consequences for future generation fitness would be achievable. But show me this manual of the universe, and the exact page where the fitness expression is explicitly given!
Without access to the actual fitness function, it's just cultural aesthetics: in the West today slender female figures, in the past or elsewhere its more plump female figures. Without access to a fitness function, it just becomes a subjective beauty contest, and we might eliminate Sickle cell anemia, and doom that whole population into the hands of malaria. Healthcare is effectively Nazi eugenics with a facelift (and they rely on unethical Nazi experiment data).