Short, speculative fiction is a great way to throw ideas out there. Loved this one! It certainly lives up to the substack's title, Asimov's science writing was profoundly influential to my teenage self, half a century ago, and so was his fiction.
This is brilliant. I’d push one idea further, though. Maybe the baseline didn’t drift. Maybe it was always unstable, and we just didn’t have the resolution to see it. Enhancement didn’t break the average. It exposed how artificial it was to begin with.
There’s already a bunch of variance between people, so studies usually have control groups that are similar to the experimental group. In fields like genomics, this can even take the form of comparisons between family members. Twin studies have famously been very important for determining things like heritability. The idea of ‘standard’ human function is already mostly an educational tool as opposed to a scientific one.
Short, speculative fiction is a great way to throw ideas out there. Loved this one! It certainly lives up to the substack's title, Asimov's science writing was profoundly influential to my teenage self, half a century ago, and so was his fiction.
This is brilliant. I’d push one idea further, though. Maybe the baseline didn’t drift. Maybe it was always unstable, and we just didn’t have the resolution to see it. Enhancement didn’t break the average. It exposed how artificial it was to begin with.
That's the thing about averages: 50% are above average, 50% are below; nobody is average!
This is a fun read and well written, but relies pretty heavily on misrepresentations of how medical research works in a way that feels distracting
Please give specific examples.
There’s already a bunch of variance between people, so studies usually have control groups that are similar to the experimental group. In fields like genomics, this can even take the form of comparisons between family members. Twin studies have famously been very important for determining things like heritability. The idea of ‘standard’ human function is already mostly an educational tool as opposed to a scientific one.
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