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The gains from engineering human capital are so large they will be plucked. Screaming “eugenics” is not going to change that. One slur does not an argument make

The gains from engineering human capital are so large they will be plucked. Screaming “eugenics” is not going to change that. One slur does not an argument make. Gains of several standard deviations in mental traits, including intelligence, are looking very plausible with minimal technological progress. We are well past the speculative phase. As we live in a competitive technological landscape and China, Korea and India do not share our taboos against genetic enhancement, we will be forced to embrace this, too. Tar and feathering human enhancement as “eugenics” worked when human enhancement was not possible. We no longer live in that world. The signal is no longer cheap. Whatever nations fail to embrace embryo selection, iterated embryo selection, and eventually genetic engineering for intelligence will find themselves as children, competing in a technological landscape they are too dull to understand. Like Lysenkoism of old, our modern mental Lysenkoism will become unsustainable. We would be wise to discard it now.

throwawaytkgll 7y ago
The problem with "eugenics" isn't that it's morally wrong, it's that it's just wrong. He Jiankui screwed up royally and endangered the life of two girls without even giving them immunity to AIDS. If there was a safe way to do "eugenics" without detrimental and unintended effects such as causing cancer due to CRISPR side effects or disrupting hitherto unknown metabolic pathways, believe me we wouldn't have waited for China. In fact, in many countries rudimentary forms of "eugenics" already exist - e.g. you're allowed to abort your fetus if it is found to have an extra chromosome. As for "intelligence" selecting for IQ points doesn't make sense. There's little reason to beleive g is anything but an artifact from factor analysis that's completely unsupported by any neurological data or known causal genetic mechanisms, and in fact a g-like measure can be proven to exist for any set of variables that positively correlate with each other regardless of existing causal links among them. The non-additive interactions with the environment are also just too high. Selecting for IQ would just result in random artificial genome drift (beyond the first obvious gains from developmental defects etc. but we sort of already do this). I think there's a real disconnect between how HN techies think about genetics and biology and the actual state of the art - it's much less grandiose than they think. Science is generally boring.

throwawaytkgll 7y ago

The problem with "eugenics" isn't that it's morally wrong, it's that it's just wrong. He Jiankui screwed up royally and endangered the life of two girls without even giving them immunity to AIDS. If there was a safe way to do "eugenics" without detrimental and unintended effects such as causing cancer due to CRISPR side effects or disrupting hitherto unknown metabolic pathways, believe me we wouldn't have waited for China. In fact, in many countries rudimentary forms of "eugenics" already exist - e.g. you're allowed to abort your fetus if it is found to have an extra chromosome. As for "intelligence" selecting for IQ points doesn't make sense. There's little reason to beleive g is anything but an artifact from factor analysis that's completely unsupported by any neurological data or known causal genetic mechanisms, and in fact a g-like measure can be proven to exist for any set of variables that positively correlate with each other regardless of existing causal links among them. The non-additive interactions with the environment are also just too high. Selecting for IQ would just result in random artificial genome drift (beyond the first obvious gains from developmental defects etc. but we sort of already do this). I think there's a real disconnect between how HN techies think about genetics and biology and the actual state of the art - it's much less grandiose than they think. Science is generally boring.