Hypothetically, that is.
How many billionaires need to be publicly executed to fix the usa political system.
Title says unethical
More than just the ones in America, I’d reckon.
Making a lot of clones of myself, raising them all differently, and seeing how many of them turn out in the same way as me.
Agreed, it’s an interesting thing to think about at least. The nature vs nurture debate is practically as old as time itself but it feels like we’re no closer to an answer outside of “it’s a bit of both.” But how much?
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Not the same, but your comment reminded me of an upcoming game I want to try The Alters
Oooh there’s a playable demo! I’m gonna try it as soon as possible!
AFAIK genes only account for physical properties like hair color and shit, and upbringing effects everything else.
Source: someone I met who claimed to be a psychiatrist told me and I’ve never confirmed it or that she actually was a psychiatrist.
There’s a interesting sci-fi book with a (vaguely) similar premise - House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds.
Worldwide, making all coffee decaf, and not telling anyone.
I did that experiment with my flatmates for some weeks once. (I love them, but they had it coming.)
One had a tighter schedule and you actually noticed the change pretty fast. I ended up telling him pretty early.
The other one didn’t notice at all, so I just went on and on. He was mad at me when I told him. Told me I should’ve just kept going if it’s working.
Both couldn’t tell from the taste alone.
You fucking monster
From what I’ve heard you’d probably see a spike in medical deaths basically immediately.
I’d probably die in a car crash pretty quickly
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Take ten or twenty thousand children, take over a fairly large portion of a midwestern state, build a large and complete environment for them to live in including towns, museums, theme parks etc. and raise them as normal Americans but absolutely 100% avoid introducing them to the concept of religion until they’re 25.
I suspect they’d invent their own. No one introduced religion to humanity. It came from within.
Then the experiment would yield data.
It would yield another religion, originated in a group that could parley their forced participation into fame on social media, which might lead to many more followers and eventually a holy war with the Mormons. Hmm. Might be worth a try.
I’m pretty sure that they would start making one up very soon.
I’m not meaning dump 20,000 children alone in the left half of Wyoming, I mean, keep them with their parents, hire teachers, teach them math and science and…basically a history that replaces a lot of “and they believed their gods said” with “the ruling class decided they wanted to”. What happens to children when they are raised in a functioning, supportive, nurturing society that does not contain religion or superstition?
Many developed countries are majoritarily irreligious. But it’s also hard to draw the line between religion and culture.
I really want someone to just really start messing around with the human genome, see the limits of gene expression. Let’s add horns, let’s add tusks, let’s add tails, and wings, and carapaces, and antennae, and claws, let’s just see what happens. Human evolution has gotten so tired and trite; let’s add some spice.
Don’t let the furrys hear you
Too late. Off to back those experiments… as soon as I figure out how to become one of the suspiciously wealthy furries
Or creating super mutant athletes. Like how fast do you think a modified human body could run? Or jump?
Most research on human embryonic stem cells - currently impossible in western countries due to ethics concerns.
Theoretically, if a few stem cells from every embryo early on and frozen that might be a huge boon for them once they grow up to adults with potential health issues. Need a new heart? Grow one in a lab from the preserved cells - perfectly compatible.
Currently these kinds of things can’t be explored, and whilst the ethics may be dubious the potential medical benefits left on the table are astonishing.
Actually just stop allowing anyone with “defective” genes to reproduce.
I am fully I wouldnt exist in this hypothetical world (-11 vision in both eyes), but I would be curious what would happen if we only ever let perfectly healthy people with no genetic defects have kids.
Like would it eventually just become a perfect world where nobody needs glasses or asthma inhalers? Or would we die off because not enough genetically “perfect” people exist to make this plan work?
I’d be curious to see how the definition of “defective” evolves over time in a society like that.
Yeah it would devolve to being like people with freckles or something utterly superficial eventually
Some traits end up being beneficial. For instance sickle cell anemia vs malaria.
That’s sounds interesting it would also be cool to see how long before defective genes show up again
As a bundle of recessive genes, I definitely wouldn’t meet the Gattaca standard. :)
Just wipe out ALL mosquitoes, and then measure what the actual influence is on the food-web for other animals and plants.
no joke but i remember reading something about this aagggeesssss ago where a group of researchers modelled the effects of no more mozzies on the food chain and found that, because barely anything fucking eats them, their eradication would be negligible
Glad to hear it.
Proceeding with Phase 1.
Phase 1 initiated
!
Take the people expressing their violent political fantasies in threads like this and make them live in the worlds they’re advocating for.
I suggested lobotomizing all conservatives. I’d 100% live in that world and love every minute of it.
What happens to them after? There are a lot of logistical issues to figure out if about 1/3 of the population of the planet suddenly couldn’t feed, dress, or care for themselves at all.
I heard there’s a guy called Luigi with a cool idea.
Lock someone is a room-wide 24h fMRI or some other imaging technique to get a full recording of a human body working.
Is it unethical if they volunteer? I’d be down!
Seems pretty tame compared to various other answers, but keeping people under anesthesia longer than expected during surgery and seeing how it affects things like memory or personality.
Supposedly after an open heart surgery I had gone through over a decade ago, my mother swears my personality changed. Though I can’t remember if that’s true because my memory has felt, in a sense, kinda foggy since then. So I wanna know if it was because I was under for longer than expected or because the surgery itself.
I’d be interested in this too. Maybe some synapsed stop firing if they are put to sleep for long enough.
Alternatively your mother might be gaslighting you.
I doubt she is gaslighting me because there’s not much for her to gain from her doing it. Tighter control over family is something I expect from her family rather than her.
I’d like to see if we can build hybrid computer systems using cultured animal tissue (like Cephalopod or maybe GMO human / Cephalopod), basically grown onto an array of tiny wires. Push sensory information through the tiny wires and see if the lump of cells can learn. If it does, put it in a Eva. Or a butler robot. Or a robot vaccuum.
Idk. Its an idea for a scifi novel I’ve had. Some company does this and what people don’t realize is the supposedly autonomous systems making their lives easier are fully conscious but live tortured existences. It would get more and more lovecraftian as the cephalopod hybrids some how take over (I was thinking maybe cancer? or networked mind) and start chopping everyone to bits. Maybe they try and eat them but they have no mouth, like how an octopus arm when detach will hunt and try to feed a non-existent mouth.
I think that’s a black mirror episode (what dystopian shenanigan isn’t, nowadays?) , something like they copied your mind digitally and then (cruelly) trained the copy to become your perfect digital assistant.
The mouse utopia experiment but on humans. Ive always seen a subset of people who bemoan having to work or develop specialized skills to contribute to society. They want everything provided for them so their whole life can be leasure and comfort. A lot of socialism and communism selling points tend to be about having social services and things provided to you.
I’m interested to see the long term affects of people in a society where EVERYTHING is provided for you all the time. Every survival concern, sexual pleasure, every base urge, every whim and desire. For decades and decades and decades. Would it be a genuine good for society or would it be a monkeys paw situation?
Ive always hypothesized that any human society that attempts this will quickly erode into something similar to the mouse utopia.
Without any environmental pressures or meaningful challenges to overcome a large portion of the population without strong internal drives will become lethally/suicidally lazy, apathetic, and narcicistic
I suspect theres a large amount of people who simply have zero internal drives to apply themselves to doing a thing unlesd they have to. without the pressure of survival in either a physical or economic way they would simply sit on their ass, jerk off, play games, and maybe groom themselves, for decades until they die. Merit and overcoming challenge are important aspects of drive and dopamine generation. You deprive a person of those things they become lethargic. If that sentiment proves itself true it will be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of ideologies.
Unethical questions:
Statistically speaking, how many people would escelate their wants to socially taboo depravities? How quickly?
How long on average would it take for pleasure to become less meaningful in the face of instant gratification? Is there a logarithmic function that charts this?
How many people on average decide to begin self harm out to seek novel sensations? How long until onset?
How many people choose to live out a full life vs taking the placebo cyanide capsule and being removed from experiment? What would their reasonings be?
I think we see aspects of this in the behaviour of the rich and ultra-rich (where “screw the rules I have money” applies). It’s pedophilia all the way down.
I’m in that Foto and I don’t like it!
Would it be space limited like the mousetopia too? If not you could have everything you desire and just go hiking for the Dopamin would be my dream lol
I’m curious if it’s even possible to satisfy every whim of a human. Do they get any access to human culture? If not, it would be like cloned birds failing to migrate.
Raise a group of a dozen newborns with absolutely zero contact outside of their own group. Food and necessities get provided of course, but no language learning, no nurturing, no generational teaching.
What kind of community do they form when they are old enough to grasp such things? Do they develop their own language; or a different method of communication entirely. How do they stratify their society, or even do they?
At a certain point, when they are old enough, introduce challenges that only work if they cooperate with one another. See what happens.
