Eugenics isn't dead—it's thriving in tech
Eugenics isn't dead—it's thriving in tech
A new book takes on the throughline from the rise of 20th-century eugenics to Silicon Valley.
Reported as "not politics" and while I can see that argument, what they're talking about here has immense political ramifications, going back to Reagan's racist "welfare queen".
I haven’t yet read Chan’s book, but I would recommend also reading Aubrey Clayton’s Bernoulli's Fallacy—which catalogs how the principle founders of eugenics were also the founders of modern statistical methodology, and how they distorted the latter to justify their beliefs.
The title claims that eugenics is thriving in tech, but then the only examples it has of that are two individuals, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Even against just these two individuals, the accusations are vague and don't include anything these individuals actually did as opposed to just said (or rather what they are claimed to have said). Then for some reason an opposition to DEI is given as an example of support for eugenics. Most of the words in the article are spent talking about the eugenics movement of a hundred years ago rather than anything happening today.
Musk and Thiel are very wealthy and influential, but they aren't "tech". This article is paranoia and click-bait.
Musk and thiel, two of the worlds richest men who exclusively made their wealth in tech companies, aren't tech related?
There are about 9,600,000 people in the US tech industry and this article never even mentions 9,599,998 of them. Even if Musk and Thiel support eugenics (and that's if) they're just talking about it as individuals, not as people who run tech companies associated with eugenics in any way. Musk is an immigrant and Thiel is gay, so you might as well say that eugenics is thriving in the immigrant community and the gay community.
Wouldn't that be like calling Lee Walton a grocer?
It’s not an investigative article—it’s a discussion with an author teasing one aspect of her book. I assume the title was meant more as a description of the book than as a claim they were trying to fully substantiate within this particular discussion about the book.
This is the kind of comment you have to reply to if you downvote
Mine, not so much, but would be nice to know why four people so far have hit the disagree button
Mother Jones has about as much journalistic integrity as Salon… aka there is none
Please please please forgive my ignorance
Looking at the basic definition of eugenics makes it seem like the sci-fi concept of editing a fetus to not have diseases. Is there something ethically wrong with that?
I know eugenics is based in nazi shit and "selective breeding" (which I'm vehemently against), but people get angry at the term, so I'm assuming we're nowhere nere the sci-fi stuff(?)
Eugenics is a very real and racist policy.
Ethiopian women in Israel 'given contraceptive without consent'
It’s historically been applied at the level of societies rather than individuals, and targeted at common traits seen as undesirable rather than at specific genetic defects. And it tends to be based on misconceptions about evolution—e.g., that an ideal population is one in which all members’ genotypes approach some hypothetical optimum, and any genetic diversity within a population is deleterious.
I see! That makes perfect sense! Thank you
Eugenics is basically selective breeding applied to humans to weed out undesirable traits like diseases or disabilities.
It sounds okay on paper but as history showed us, it is, more often than not, used to justify heinous shit. Especially when you leave it to humans to define "undesirable traits".
Nazis used it, but so did America, Japan, China, France and many many more.
And now, imagine tech bros from the Valley wanting to engineer the genome and deliver the "perfect" baby to some rich fucks. We're obviously not there yet, but it's only a matter of time if we let them.Racists like Musk love it because it's a way to reduce "unwanted" populations without saying it outright
Good, we're way behind schedule. The Eugenics Wars were supposed to happen back in the 90s!