I simply am incapable of tolerating institutionalization sufficiently to cope with formal education. However, I am incurably curious, and just figured out how to learn things I wanted to know. As a result of my personal experience, I am pretty confident that most people are far more competent than they think they are, and reckon their education successfully convinced them learning things sucks.
Your experience seems to confirm this. I feel fortunate that I haven't tainted my love of biology by associating it with institutions. While not everyone is as intolerant of such social control, most folks do find some aspects of it regrettable, and end up associating learning with those negatives. Some are capable of the necessary self reflection to recognize this in themselves, and it is them I hope to encourage to surmount that negative association and persuade to independently learn what is necessary to master modern decentralized means of production, such as CRISPR, 3d printing, and etc.
While not everyone, or even a majority of folks will, those that do are those that will benefit and prosper. For them, that victory over domestication will be meaningful and I believe history shows that whenever bottlenecks happen, it is those best prepared that rebuild what comes after.
Thanks!
I, personally, feel that the greatest hindrance to "education" is the term "you'll never be able" about anything.
The instant those words are uttered, it slams a door shut in a persons mind and future abilities.
So far, I am a fan!!!
3-D Printing, especially, is almost as ground-breaking as the invention of the printing press.
It is, but CRISPR is even moreso, and how those and other tech like mesh networks, AI, and much more will concatenate to create effects and abilities in combination that aren't even foreseeable from considering them in isolation, I think will be a far greater step for mankind.
Is CRISPR a good thing or a bad thing? Sounds kind of dangerous.
Let me give an analogy. Is 10 million tons of gold in your backyard a good thing or bad thing?
It depends on how fast it's moving. If it's just sitting there, you're golden. It it's traveling at 20 m/s you're over.
Tools are the same way. Is a shovel a good thing or bad thing? If you need to move a dog turd, it's just right. If you need to make a canal from Pennsylvania to New York, you're gonna need better tools. CRISPR is a tool. With appropriate knowledge and devices, you can make a change in an organisms DNA, by yourself, on your kitchen table.
Nothing that can conceivably be done could prevent that from remaining true for the rest of time, except exterminating humanity, because this knowledge has become known. Should you personally learn it? Others will. Psychopaths definitely will, so they can do bad things. Bad things will happen, and there's no way to stop them from happening, as we see today in Wuhan.
We cannot prove nCoV is a naturally occurring pathogen, or if it was made by scientists working for psychos in a Canadian BSL-4 lab, stolen by Chinese spies, and accidentally released by the Wuhan BSL-4 lab. If ACE 2 expression governs susceptibility to the virus, then people with the knowledge of CRISPR could conceivably alter their DNA to not express ACE 2 in their lung cells, and protect themselves from the pathogen.
So, is CRISPR dangerous? Sure, but so are shovels. Should we ban it? No. Bad people already have it, and won't obey laws, because they're bad people. Good people will obey laws, and if we ban it they can't use it to protect themselves from bad people. Banning it can only hurt good people.
If Kung Flu was made by bad people, those bad people are the government, either of Canada or China (or covert spies from wherever). Government is probably the worst psychopath that exists, and the theory that Kung Flu is bioengineered is based on that. Banning things is done by government. So, psychos won't obey government bans, and governments are psychos.
The only people we can trust to do good with 10 million tons of gold, shovels, or CRISPR are we good people. We need to learn CRISPR, or we're going to get hurt by psychos who know it already.
I would rather that we not mess with the DNA to the extent we can't totally make it work, similar to the problems you might get with GMOs, etc. I agree with you that prohibitions has created elevated black markets. I don't like white bread to the extent that it extracts things from the bread that should be there. So, I'm ok with CRISPR to the extent that it does not make things worse. If CRISPR can help, then we should utilize it as much as we can.