I suspect Chiang, though obviously conflicted, has major sympathy for Students for Equality Everywhere (SEE). Towards them, I have almost none. And maybe this is my true objection.
I am also extremely against this kind of egalitarianism. But there’s one line of argument that makes me somewhat sympathetic to SEE, which is that there’s a taboo around acknowledging ugliness and how bad it is to be ugly. And so there’s a kind of self-deception going on in most people, where they both think that ugly people should be treated better, but also don’t want to confront their own complicity in treating ugly people badly. I’m sympathetic to observing this kind of society-wide hypocrisy and guilt and wanting to make it go away.
Having said that, a lot of the guilt is induced by egalitarian intuitions in the first place, and so I think the SEE approach would make the problem significantly worse by creating more social coercion around beauty. I’m less compelled than you by the idea that the gene pool would drift towards ill-health, because:
much of the selection for beauty would be replaced by selection for intelligence, which is also a proxy for health
this is the kind of thing which could easily be fixed by rational policy on genetic engineering
But of course that rational policy wouldn’t happen if calli becomes a locus of strong guilt, coercion, and rigid identity.
I am also extremely against this kind of egalitarianism. But there’s one line of argument that makes me somewhat sympathetic to SEE, which is that there’s a taboo around acknowledging ugliness and how bad it is to be ugly. And so there’s a kind of self-deception going on in most people, where they both think that ugly people should be treated better, but also don’t want to confront their own complicity in treating ugly people badly. I’m sympathetic to observing this kind of society-wide hypocrisy and guilt and wanting to make it go away.
Having said that, a lot of the guilt is induced by egalitarian intuitions in the first place, and so I think the SEE approach would make the problem significantly worse by creating more social coercion around beauty. I’m less compelled than you by the idea that the gene pool would drift towards ill-health, because:
much of the selection for beauty would be replaced by selection for intelligence, which is also a proxy for health
this is the kind of thing which could easily be fixed by rational policy on genetic engineering
But of course that rational policy wouldn’t happen if calli becomes a locus of strong guilt, coercion, and rigid identity.