Shortness is now a treatable condition

Not being immortal (in the sense of dying from old age) is obviously an illness, but hasn't been recognized as such by most outside the transhumanist community, because it's universal. It would be in a sane society, but there you go.

Is the set of all possible fatal illnesses itself an illness? I don't think so; that just seems like a type error. Lack of immortality is a bad thing that society ought to take steps towards fixing, but calling it an illness is just mixing up terminology.

Yes - you'd need to include more particular desert-island circumstances before I'd give up being immortal. Though I was assuming the 'stuck' was temporary, with a limiting case of having to swim / walk across the ocean to get home.

Clearly being stuck on a desert island is also an illness.

There is one study that demonstrated that among top 1% SAT scorers investigated some years after testing, the upper quartile produces about twice the number of patents as the lower one (and about 6 times the average, if I remember right). That seems to imply that having more really top performers might produce more useful goods even if the vast majority of them never invent anything great.

Even a tiny shift upwards of everybody's IQ has a pretty impressive multiplicative effect at the high end.

Interpersonal skills are more important for job success than IQ, but I doubt great skills will produce goods useful across society in the same way as an invention does. A high EQ person probably just makes the local social network better, which has a relatively limited overall effect.

I'm reasonably sure that high IQ (i.e. over 140) is not particularly well correlated with outstanding achievement. I am almost certain that extremely high IQ's are not a prerequisite for extraordinary achievement, though there may be some specific fields where this does not hold true (say, theoretical physics).

I remember reading that the optimal IQ for success in life is actually about 130, but can't find a source for that now. I did find this though, which seems to support your claim.

I think that having the general population's IQ raised would have such wide-ranging effects that looking at society as it is now isn't a very good indicator of what that would be like. Society as it is now isn't set up to support people with very high IQs (or even get the most out of the IQs that people have to begin with), so I'm pretty sure there would be changes to all kinds of things to fix that.

I'm sure they could do something useful. I say that.

But I don't think they'll do so much for me that it'd make up for it. As I said, consider the job market. This pill would put me into the bottom 30% of the population IQ-wise (I'm guessing, does anyone have the actual numbers? The only people I would still be above would be the 110-130 range.). Have you looked at how well the current bottom 30% does? From what I remember of the job statistics in The Bell Curve, the prospects are absolutely dismal, and seem likely to get worse over time thanks to automation.

Smart people can be fun to be around - if you can follow them. If next to everyone was at least 10 points higher than you, then you're always going to be the slow one trying to catch up & figure out what's so funny. (The situation is even worse if the hypothetical situation shifts the whole bell curve out.)

If you think 10 points isn't a big enough difference to matter socially, then I have an experiment for you: take on a similar handicap and see how much fun your favorite social group interaction is; I suggest that you put in some loose ear-plugs to approximate being hard of hearing.

(My experience is that a ~10 points deficit in the other people makes up for my bum ears as far as understanding & participating in the flow of conversation, so I reason that it should work the other way around.)

Few traits that determine social status are easy to manipulate.

You appear to have a single-scale, and thus completely inaccurate, concept of social status. I'd hesitate to label anything as "offensive," because I don't really believe in offense, but you appear to be seriously naive and misinformed if your comments here are intended even slightly seriously.

One of the strongest markers of social status is diction and pronunciation. It is not a perfect indicator, but one can often deduce someone's social status from two minutes of conversation, simply by what words they use, the quality of their grammar, if they use expletives in casual conversation, if they have an accent, and other related indicators.

Diction is fairly easy to manipulate, particularly in childhood. People are nonetheless extremely resistant to changing their diction. Try correcting the grammar of anyone over six and see how it goes. Changing diction is only beneficial within specific subgroups. If you speak like you went to Eton in the rural south, you are going have trouble fitting in with the local social order. If you speak like you're from the rural South at Eton, you're likely to have the same problem. Thus, there is clear evidence that there is a manipulable and powerful indicator of social status that does not get manipulated, principally because it is unlikely to improve social status within a selected peer group, and thus is seen as a part of a person's identity.

This objection applies to your statement about race generally generally. An individual's race does not affect their social status objectively or in a specific direction. Many non-whites derive higher status within their existing social circle due to their race. This is emphatically not confined to low-status individuals; I grudgingly use Clarence Thomas as a rather obvious demonstration of this fact - he would never have attained such an important and respectable position without being black.

The idea that an innate trait shared by millions of people that often forms a key part of their identities would be voluntarily altered were the opportunity provided suggests, first, that you do not know many black people, and, second, that you have an extremely oversimplified and naive view of race, culture, and social status.

I appreciate the link, but this isn't a matter of whether being black lowers social status - what I disputed is the original assertion that illness is defined by the effect on social status.

You're right that most people will undergo procedures to eliminate undesirable traits and create or enhance desirable ones - your body odor example is apt - but that's a lifestyle choice.

Few traits that determine social status are easy to manipulate.

You appear to have a single-scale, and thus completely inaccurate, concept of social status. I'd hesitate to label anything as "offensive," because I don't really believe in offense, but you appear to be seriously naive and misinformed if your comments here are intended even slightly seriously.

One of the strongest markers of social status is diction and pronunciation. It is not a perfect indicator, but one can often deduce someone's social status from two minutes of conversation, simply by what words they use, the quality of their grammar, if they use expletives in casual conversation, if they have an accent, and other related indicators.

Diction is fairly easy to manipulate, particularly in childhood. People are nonetheless extremely resistant to changing their diction. Try correcting the grammar of anyone over six and see how it goes. Changing diction is only beneficial within specific subgroups. If you speak like you went to Eton in the rural south, you are going have trouble fitting in with the local social order. If you speak like you're from the rural South at Eton, you're likely to have the same problem. Thus, there is clear evidence that there is a manipulable and powerful indicator of social status that does not get manipulated, principally because it is unlikely to improve social status within a selected peer group, and thus is seen as a part of a person's identity.

This objection applies to your statement about race generally generally. An individual's race does not affect their social status objectively or in a specific direction. Many non-whites derive higher status within their existing social circle due to their race. This is emphatically not confined to low-status individuals; I grudgingly use Clarence Thomas as a rather obvious demonstration of this fact - he would never have attained such an important and respectable position without being black.

The idea that an innate trait shared by millions of people that often forms a key part of their identities would be voluntarily altered were the opportunity provided suggests, first, that you do not know many black people, and, second, that you have an extremely oversimplified and naive view of race, culture, and social status.

In case you don't believe being black lowers your social status in this culture, even four year old black children know it.

I'd like to see that experiment replicated in South-Saharan Africa, where "albinos" (white people) are persecuted as witches and said to have magical powers.

It's also been suggested to be a significant part of why overweight people have more health problems.

I'm assuming it's this Ashley X, who I hadn't heard of before a cursory Google search.

Except the reasoning on the OkCupid blog is completely worthless because of this little note:

We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.

In other words, they fucking control for physical attractiveness. If men found e.g. Black women more physically attractive en masse, their charts wouldn't reflect that. What actual effect they were measuring, exactly, is a mystery to me at the moment.

There are certainly some blacks who value lighter skin and straighter hair, but saying that they really want to become white makes as much sense as saying that a white woman who gets a tan really wants to become black. Two other major problems:

plenty of black people would take it, what would increase status gap even further, until only tiny fraction of people stayed black.

This does not follow. It would depend on what subgroup took it and which did not. I also think you seriously need to go talk to some actual black people before you make this claim.

There's earnings gap, lifespan gap, larger chance of being a crime victim when you're "Black". It's naive to think that people would stay "Black" voluntarily if it was a matter of choice.

You assume that, holding all else constant, but changing people's skin color, all these things would go away. This actually sounds like cartoonish, 18th-century-style racism to me. I would love to see some theoretical description of the problems faced by blacks such that merely changing their skin color/facial features would solve most or all of these problems - I rather believe they're caused by complex social, cultural, and economic factors that are ultimately independent of race. You could carve out a subsection of whites with similar characteristics, if you picked the right selection criteria.

Using cosmetics to lighten skin is NOT the same as trying to "heal blackness". White people often darken their skin with chemicals (sunless tanning). This is NOT because they don't want to be white, or because they are trying to "heal whiteness". This is just a cosmetic change. In the United States at least, blackness is a boolean data type. You either are black or not. Being 25% black=Black all the way. Lightening skin is not about decreasing blackness.

Nobody says blackness is an illness now, because you cannot change it. If it ever became easily changeable, that would change very quickly.

Not a chance. Deaf people face all sorts of real world challenges and discrimination, but they often don't cure their deafness (say, with cochlear implants) because they feel a sense of comraderie. Black people would face overwhelming social scorn if they chose to become white. Black people who are considered even slightly

Note that this happened with, for instance, Italian immigrants to the US. There was a huge industry in teaching immigrants to look/act/talk more like Americans. This probably resulted from anti-Italian discrimination, especially during WWII.

his might depend on the exact shape of the height distribution curve...

Right. It could be that increasing the height of the bottom 1-2% by a notable difference will get them to be as tall as, say, 5% of men i.e. negatively affecting 5% of men, in exchange for helping 1-2%. It's not clear whether the trade-off will be worth it.