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Here's the primary piece: > At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire ge
by smaili 9y ago
Here's the primary piece:
> At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.
It's also interesting to note this was authored in 2013. I would be curious to know the kinds of things discovered in the ~4 year span.
- pcnonpc 9y agoFrom the piece, it shouldn't take very long to put it to use. "When do you think the embryo analysis might be implemented on a large scale? Actual use of the technology to do embryo screening might take five to ten years, but it could be just a few years. It depends on how motivated they are."
- HiroshiSan 9y agois a high IQ enough to determine 'success'?
- BurningFrog 9y agoNo, but there is a strong correlation.
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- foobaw 9y agoNot necessarily but I would argue that the chance of success is higher for a person with higher IQ.
- jaredhansen 9y agoIt's not "enough", but it really helps. It's highly correlated with a whole host of different positive life outcomes.[1] People argue over how important it is, and it's certainly not the only thing that matters, but yes, the general consensus is that IQ is meaningful and predictive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 27182818284 9y agoI think you could form an entire HN thread just on what it means to be successful. For example is Reddit a success despite not having IPOed? Are you a success if you have as many kids as possible? (Genghis Khan is probably the most successful persons of all time judging by that)
- koolba 9y ago> Are you a success if you have as many kids as possible? That's the usual yardstick. Hence the expression, success breeds success.
- indigochill 9y agoIs it really that complicated? As I see it, success is achieving your goals. Set goals and achieve them and you've succeeded, whether that's family or money or building a hyperloop or grilling the tastiest grilled cheese known to man... whatever. Given enough time none of it will matter so just pick something and run with it. Don't bother with whether other people are successful by your criteria because they probably don't have the same goals as you (unless your goal is to somehow judge if other people are successful I guess, which sounds silly but I guess by my own rules I can't judge).
- tormeh 9y agoNo. The most important factors, in diminishing order, are: Grit, intelligence, beauty, education. But if you read the article, they're not really selecting for IQ itself, but academic success, so that covers all of the factors, just weighed.
- nerpderp83 9y agoWhich include obedience if they are only measuring PhDs.
- AstralStorm 9y agoIt depends on how you define intelligence. If you go broad, grit and such are part of it. A broad definition is ability to solve problems. Beauty is outside it unless it really solves some problem... which it well might in some occupations.
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- jandrese 9y agoIt's not sufficient, but arguably necessary. There are roughly three things that make you successful: 1. Being smart 2. Working hard 3. Opportunity Everybody can do #2, but most won't. #1 is at least partially genetic. #3 is mostly luck, but is influenced by the other two. In fact all of the factors influence one another to a degree. Being born in an area with good schools and working hard can overcome somewhat deficient genetics for #1 for example. On the flipside, being born a genius in sub-Saharan Africa with no opportunities or even anything to work hard for makes success almost impossible.
- sharemywin 9y agoYou forgot the 2 that count the most luck and network.
- HiroshiSan 9y agoI feel like opportunity covers that.
- jandrese 9y agoThat's opportunity. The network is basically being born into the right circles, which is pretty much entirely luck. A few people do break in through sheer determination and/or a lucky break with some contacts.
- astrange 9y ago#2 is also genetic. Stamina and attention span count for a lot.
- sharemywin 9y agoNature versus nurture either way it's all your parents fault...lol.
- logfromblammo 9y agoIt's the same as the crime triangle of motive, method, and opportunity. Opportunity counts the most. You can't win if you never get the chance to play. Motive is next, as you can't succeed unless you have the will to do whatever is necessary. At some level, sufficient motive can generate additional opportunities, but there is an upper limit on how much you can supplement the genuine opportunities arising from pure chance. Method is least important. There are often many ways to accomplish the same results, ranging from dead simple to prohibitively complex. If you have simple goals, you can still achieve them simplemindedly. . . . And I think I now have a hypothesis about why so many rich folks seem like crooks.
- threatofrain 9y agoNo, just like a healthy immune system doesn't mean success. I keep telling everyone that having a healthy immune system isn't everything.
- gwern 9y agoIt's a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since so much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and major new findings are being uploaded to Biorxiv at an almost daily rate. I think the short version would be that the BGI project made a bad bet on a particular genetic architecture of intelligence (rare variants with large boosting effects) which would have implied that a tiny sample of whole genomes from very smart people would yield a lot of genetic variants; this was wrong and they turned up little, and then the project was further damaged by BGI's disastrous strategic choice to try to develop its own genome sequencer tech rather than using Illumina's, which set it back by years. What actually wound up happening in 2013 was that a big consortium of American & European research groups, the SSGAC, pooled simple SNP data (ie the sort of thing you get from 23andMe) rather than whole genomes, for 100k people, and got the first genetic variants for intelligence (rendering the BGI project largely moot). SSGAC has kept expanding its sample size, and the massive UK Biobank dataset started coming online (just completed their full n=500k release!), and the combination has yielded hit after hit. The last paper from last year turned up 172 SNP hits, and there will be another paper this year which will expand that even more. In conjunction with this, the IQ polygenic scores have been used for all sorts of exciting things: people have been computing genetic correlations with health and psychiatric traits, been looking at cross-national differences, examined changes over thousands of years using ancient DNA, decreases over the past century confirming dysgenics, been deploying methods for detecting selection in different populations, and nailing down the architecture as having the same heritability in normal people as in very intelligent people with no special rare variants detected, and being mostly additive with most of that coming from common SNPs but the rest from relatively rare harmful variants suggesting a mutation load explanation of why there is any genetic contribution. As far as embryo selection goes, '5-15 points' is very much an upper bound assuming the entire population, great polygenic scores (better than the ones in 2017, perhaps more like 2020-level), and ignoring the practicalities like loss of embryos in the IVF process. I've tried to work through a full analysis of what embryo selection could do, and it's not earth-shaking unless there are huge improvements: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection https://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection (Which is why I'm more interested in iterated embryo selection and genome synthesis now.)
- le-mark 9y ago
- sametmax 9y agoA dictatorship that wants to shut down criticism but raise IQ ? That seems like contradiction 101.
- the8472 9y agoIs disobedience correlated with intelligence? Especially when the superiors are not less intelligent than the one who is receiving orders?
- jandrese 9y agoPersonally I tend to feel less respect for people who are noticeably dumber than I am. I think that's basic human nature, or at least my nature. Tyrants know this. You see it when they feel threatened and start purging their subordinates. If they don't respect you they can fear you instead.
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago"That Cassius over there has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Men like him are dangerous." [1] 1: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.1.2.html http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.1.2.h...
- 794CD01 9y agoSo find the smartest person and make them the dictator. Problem solved.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- the8472 9y agoWe are talking about a population engineered to be more intelligent, so the assumption is that the rulers would also be more intelligent, so this gap would not exist
- rglovejoy 9y ago
- balls187 9y ago> At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. That's essentially how Dr. Mindbender created Serpentor.
- pcnonpc 9y agoTo relate this to the news about CTE in American Football, I wonder how much American mental potential has been lost to CTE. One thing for sure, very few East Asian and few Asian American parents who are aware of the news will allow their kids to play the sport. What about the reactions from other American parents? "Symptoms of CTE, which occur in four stages, generally appear 8 to 10 years after an athlete experiences repetitive mild traumatic brain injury." There were about 1,100,000 million high school players in 2014. This is approximately 7% of US high school students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy#American_football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...
- throwaway328832 9y agoThe world will soon be a much much miserable place.