On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 04:49:33AM -0800, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> Losing the information content
> contained in that process becomes increasing undesirable the
> later it occurs.
A strong argument for both anti-aging and abortion.
> However, even infanticide could under some
> circumstances be an acceptable form of triage
> (see: http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=triage)
> such as when a mother may seek to maintain sufficient bodily
> resources to feed an older infant.
+1 Insightful
> In considering the information loss associated with an abortion,
> one may wish to balance that against the information loss that
> occurs with the incarceration of 28% of the black and 16% of the
> hispanic men in the U.S. at some point in their lives [SciAm,
> Dec 01, pg 28, DOJ estimates]. There is a loss of tax dollars that
> could be devoted to more productive purposes, a loss of security
> due to people committing the crimes that put them in jail, loss
> of productive lives that evidence suggests are more likely to
> result *if* the children are "wanted" by the parents, etc.).
I'm not sure what the connection to abortion is, but I'll take the
opportunity anyway to repeat that the War on Drugs is the #1 threat
to extropy. Not only are the lives and information content of the
men (and increasingly women) imprisoned for drugs destroyed, prison
teaches them how to be maximally entropic forces upon release --
to say nothing about the damage done to our institutions and the
terror and destruction visited upon less fortunate countries as a
result.
> One might even go so far in a really extropic society as to prevent
> the possibility of reproduction until one has been sufficiently
> educated that one has a moderately successful chance of raising
> contributing members of society. The idea of allowing people to
> drive other peoples lives before having demonstrated an ability
> to successfully drive their own makes very little sense to me.
> Of course this raises the question of whether humans have a
> fundamental right to create really screwed up lives for other
> humans.
There should be an _option_ for both sexes to be sterilized
(especially men, vasectomy is much less invasive and easier to
reverse than tubal ligation) just before reproduction is possible.
Reversal technology is improving rapidly, and should be more than
ready for today's youth once they are ready in all senses to
reproduce and parent in a couple decades. Caveat: I don't know
how early sterilization could be done without disrupting development,
and I doubt much research has been done to find out.
-- Mike Linksvayer http://gondwanaland.com/ml/
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