Individuals and groups (including businesses) do have goals though, and it seems natural that some of them feel that they're being thwarted in their pursuit of those goals by expectations that they accommodate every little minority (including the one to which I belong). The backlash against legislation requiring accessibility, for example, is real, as seen in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30726471

If we're no longer taking even the slightest bit of care towards looking after our fellow Man then it's not a world worth living to me.

EDIT: It's also not just a "tiny minority", about 13% of the world's population have serious vision impairment. Making streets, businesses, services, products accessible is the very least we can do. It's scary that someone who suffers from this himself would chalk it off as inefficiency and waste.

It's somehow similar to the way so many of us expect actually evil people to somehow come with horns or other evil-indicating visual accessories. The reality is that evil people wear suits, and jeans, and shorts and hats and look just like the non-evil people.

So it is with "reasonable". The fact that someone can phrase their objections to accessibility that doesn't make them immediately sound like a prejudiced ignorant lunatic doesn't actually mean that they are not a prejudiced ignorant lunatic (it doesn't mean that they are either, but you should remain suspicious).

For myself, I had a revelation about such matters when my daughter had major hip surgery (twice). While normally a fully mobile and athletic person, she had to spend several weeks (twice) with a wheelchair. Suddenly it became clear that the accomodations we have made in this direction are not just for people born with disabilities that prevent them from walking: any one of us could find ourselves, either temporarily or permanently, benefitting from ramps and door openers and curb cuts etc.

I am absolutely certain that the same is also true of accomodations made in the direction of visual impairment, hearing impairment and just about any other condition that deviates from some (often hypothetical) state of "full functionality".

Please, protect yourself from the backlash from these "seemingly reasonable" people. They are ignorant, selfish and of limited scope in their thinking. You deserve better.

Between spending several months on crutches ten-ish years ago and helping care for several elderly relatives, I'm a believer.

Then we should start with the assumption that they're not, right? I'm guessing that starting out by assuming the worst in others is one thing that contributes to the current polarization in US politics.

> Please, protect yourself from the backlash from these "seemingly reasonable" people.

What specifically do you advise that I do here? I don't want to just ignore challenges to the idea that accessibility should be a requirement. If I pay attention to these people and put in the effort to understand why they think as they do, then I can become a more effective advocate, or possibly even revise my position. Yes, the latter may lead me to question whether I should even exist, but it seems to me that a healthy mind should be able to dispassionately contemplate hypotheticals that even threaten oneself.

However, while we definitely need more empathy, the world is also full of stupidity, and there's a point in everything where you need to be able to stop putting your energy into fighting the stupid. There's a point where you have to say "no, wait, these people are not actually arguing in good faith, i've explained to them over and over again why they are wrong, why the evidence of the last N years shows them to be wrong, and they have no answer to this, and just keep repeating the same falsehoods. I'm done".

Now, if you're not at that point with the people you engage with about this, great, keep aiming for empathy and understanding. But if you are, move on.

There's a company I collaborated with once who had an epiphany when they realized they had been putting way too much energy into trying to prevent people ripping off their software. They changed direction and focused on ignoring the people who did that, and instead tried to provide the best possible customer service and support they could to people who had paid them. Things got better for everyone. I think there's a general lesson here about where best to direct one's energies.

You need to realize we are currently implementing eugenics, we just don't know what our goals are.

There's two types of eugenics, positive and negative, based on the root of postulate. A positive eugenics program selects *for* specific qualities like hair color. Negative eugenics selects *against* deleterious phenotypes.

You still need to exercise caution. For example, selecting against depression may be long term bad because the real thing we need to do is reform society to reduce depression. But there are some things, like being born with a disability, that have obvious impact outside of a functioning society that it seems reasonable to select against them.

W.r.t. the parent comment to yours, I'm conflicted; I've spoken to people and seen how many issues they have getting accomodation. If people were forced to care, making interfaces for blind people would be pretty easy. But many people refuse to care.

The idea of genetic drift due to lack of selective pressure has been studied (recently, and in a way not connected to racism) and was pretty grim. Unfortunately due to the connotations eugenics typically carries it has remained poorly investigated.

Bit of a tangent, but I think sexual reproduction helps to avoid this. Picture a set of points (people) in Euclidean space. Pick any two, "a" and "b", at random. Add a new point "c" at the midpoint. Unless the overall shape of this swarm is highly nonconvex, then this point "c" is going to be more in the "interior". If we formalized things a little more, we could prove that this operation is a contraction. The Fixed Point Theorem would apply, &etc.

So, once your set has reached some convex shape, then there's a balance between these two forces: The contracting force of sexual reproduction, and the expanding force of random mutation.

There's also selection of course. I tacitly assume there isn't much more of that happening right now? I could be wrong though; there may be some (strong?) selection against education...

Interestingly, it's these educated who I assume would "benefit" from a eugenics regime. But, one bad meme, and the whole thing goes bad...

Eugenics does not automatically mean we all customize our embryos to be 2m tall geniuses with patterned body hair.

More of an aside, but I’ve always wondered where humans would end up if we did do unbridled genetic engineering. Is 2m the ideal height? 1.80m? 2.40m? What would we discover is the optimal IQ? Etc.

I think Brave New World treats this question pretty well. We'd probably discover that there is no 'optimal' height or IQ and we'd still need the whole span of "Big Dumb Brutes" to hyper-geniuses. The secret is convince everybody the IQ/physique they've been assigned is the 'actual' optimal and they're the lucky ones that everybody else should envy.

I'm just under 2m and I can assure you: it is not.

Your parents might have conceived again, and had another child who did pass, to whom they gave the same name. But that child wouldn't be you.