7 ms·

The Slow Frontier of Genetic Choice

18 points by flobosg 3y ago

chr1 3y ago
A very important part of this frontier is ability to create genetic copies to see which part of a trait is genetic. It is crazy that we ban research on cloning, and still don't have many clones of successful scientists.
- calepayson 3y ago
  I think we put too much weight on intelligence as the factor differentiating innovators from the rest. If we were to clone some great scientists from the past I believe would be underwhelmed. Not because these aren’t brilliant people but because brilliance isn’t the most important factor in innovation. Rather, innovation is driven by people who are exposed to a novel environment and are just smart enough to not ignore it. Bill Gates’ highschool was the only one in the US with a computer. Albert Einstein was working in a patent office where he saw a conga-line of patents discussing how to standardize the measurement of time across vast geographies. Both brilliant people. Both exposed to a novel societal idea. Thankfully they were smart enough to run with it.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    > but because brilliance isn’t the most important factor in innovation I suspect having at least moderately wealthy parents is a huge factor. I'm sure a lot of potentially great scientists died unknown for absence of those.
    - lumost 3y ago
      Aye - having the choice to not take the economically best action is a unique one. On average you would expect this to be born out in most academic fields where the researcher either comes from a background enabling their exploration on economically viable terms - or academia is surprisingly the most economic choice.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
    >Albert Einstein was working in a patent office where he saw a conga-line of patents discussing how to standardize the measurement of time across vast geographies. I don't thik this was a relevant factor. Certainly not as much as reading Poincare's work (which anyone had access to).
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  The issue with eugenics isn't the fundamental science, it's that the "elites" in charge of it are simply loaded with cognitive biases to support their (often inherited, arbitrary, or fortunate) positions. Almost all solutions to actually solving environmentalism and sustainability at a long term global level involve lots of complicated policies which seemingly can only be accomplished with a higher degrees of altruism, better intelligence of multiple flavors, etc. https://youtu.be/pRIIwJh1DDQ?t=165 https://youtu.be/pRIIwJh1DDQ?t=165 We kind of NEED a general increase to intellect and ability. Also would save on rising health care costs. Ironically, we'd need some sort of eugenics for the ruling elite to truly raise them to a point that they could then responsibly apply eugenics to the rest of the population. The "elite" will probably start doing this in the next 50 years. Honestly I'm shocked it hasn't started in my lifetime (I'm ~50 years old)
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  Seems like a better return on investment there would be to make sure everybody has access to nutrition, education, opportunity, and so on.
  - Purplehermann 3y ago
    Depends how cheap gene editing gets. If you can mass-produce adenoviruses that improve iq 15 points and health significantly, that's going to be way cheaper than nutrition, forget education and of course opportunity. Of course, better genes means nutrition, education and opportunity go further
  - chr1 3y ago
    No matter how well you eat and get educated, you are not going to be able to do even a fraction of what John von Neumann or Srinivasa Ramanujan were able to do. And very often people like them were able to do that despite all the odds, not because they had the best opportunities.
    - Nevermark 3y ago
      The point isn’t that everyone could be a von Neumann, given consistently good conditions. The point is that the world would benefit from even one more von Neumann. Which would also indicate the likelihood of a lot of other people achieving more than they would have under more adverse conditions.
      - chr1 3y ago
        On the contrary, it indicates that truly talented and capable people are rare. Having more of them would allow the rest of us to live under less adverse conditions, find a way to become smarter and live longer. The point is that we could have dozens of von Neumann's twin brothers helping us to speed up that process, but we choose not to for no good reason.
        Nevermark 3y ago
        I think we agree then. Even one additional Von Neumann would be great. More would be fantastic. And would be associated with a lot of other more impactful people. The “good” reason for not providing better conditions is we don’t have a system for that. My vote would be that the value of all raw natural resources not created by human beings efforts be considered a joint inheritance. The raw value of them being shared by all equally with a focus on health and education for children, and keeping adults above survival mode. We would all benefit from that investment, even the rich. The efforts of those who extract and process them, as with any human added value, would be rewarded by the competitive marketplace as usual.
Traubenfuchs 3y ago
We could mass breed humans in conditions currently faced by pigs in high rise pig farms to brute force parts of this process. Not perfect for traits that require a nurturing and stimulating environment, but great for several health related ones, probably. Maybe stimulation could be provided through welded on VR equipment, AI companions and treadmills? I am sure there are plenty of ways to provide "fake" stimulation to those genetic research farm humans to increase the range of research possible. High rise pig farm: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-26-storey-pig-skyscraper-ready-to-produce-1-million-pigs-a-year https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-2...
- throwanem 3y ago
  > We could mass breed humans in conditions currently faced by pigs in high rise pig farms to brute force parts of this process. "Genetic engineering isn't progressing as quickly as I'd like. How could we solve that?...I know! Let's invent a slave race." I could just downvote and move on, and I probably should. But I find today I can't help asking: Do you hear yourself?
  - Traubenfuchs 3y ago
    When hypothetically exploring fantastic but at least borderline feasible ideas, I like to turn off my moral and ethical filters. Exploring extreme, frightening, exciting, terrifying, sickening ideas, assuming I stand on the winners/good/not-bad side of things. It can be refreshing, almost exhilarating, depending on how strong you imagine it.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      You aren't the first to comment on the experience. Someone said once, it looks back. You should think about that.
paultopia 3y ago
given the eugenic flavor of all this, sort of feels less kk.org and more kkk.org
- Purplehermann 3y ago
  On the one hand yes, on the other I want to genetically engineer chickens to lay multiple purple eggs daily
  - paultopia 3y ago
    yes, that would be awesome. Also, I want a bioluminescent cat[1] [1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-glow-in-the-dark-kitty-77372763/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-glow-in-th...
gwern 3y ago
> The challenge is the human proteins needed to make each of these to happen can conflict with each other. The proteins — created by the genes — needed for risk taking may be the ones that dampen good listening. There are genetic trade offs, in that you cannot optimize all traits. In other words there are genetic costs for each trait. To raise IQ might cost lowering something else, such as empathy. It’s not that there is a zero-sum quantity being conserved, it’s that genes cannot do all that is possible. They are hugely constrained by each other. It is like trying to design a machine: it cannot optimize all properties; it cannot be fastest, lightest, strongest, and cheapest at the same time. Everything is a trade off. Performance, reliability, speed, cost — all are trade off between them. Genes and traits also operate under the same regime of trade offs. There are no free lunches. Untrue.
- Purplehermann 3y ago
  While the author's framing is wrong, aren't there genes that have positive dominant effects and negative recessive effects?
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  "Untrue." Can you be more specific? This kind of smug response is worthy of Twitter, incapable of starting any deeper conversation on a pretty deep topic.
  - Purplehermann 3y ago
    When things are just.. wrong, there's not much reason to be specific. Especially when gwern.net has multiple long-form blog posts discussing these topics
  - gwern 3y ago
    Kelly is making extremely sweeping broad claims based on no evidence and flimsy analogies which are obviously wrong - humans are not carefully-engineered cars competing in a free market where cars could exist on a Pareto frontier (which itself would be a rather questionable claim...), they are organisms under a bombardment of mutations constantly happening and those mutations being very slowly purged by natural selection over thousands of generations. It is not surprising that there could be 'free lunches', anymore than it is surprising that there might be typos left in a file after a cat walked across your keyboard and you tried to fix it. I don't need to provide any references because Kelly didn't provide any of his own: what is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. I shouldn't be held to a higher standard than he is simply because he said his claims first. He's not a geneticist or psychologist or otherwise working in this area, so there shouldn't be even a presumption here that he is probably right if he isn't going to provide any evidence or sources or more convincing arguments than 'there just can't be free lunches, there can't!'. I am being rude here because I am fed up with decades of people making these sweeping assertions about genetic correlations while simply completely ignoring the large literature actually measuring these FUD bugaboos. Kelly, and everyone making those arguments, deserves nothing but mockery until they show any sign of catching up to the literature as of, let's say, 1990 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genetic_correlation&oldid=863326253#Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genetic_correlati...), and while we're at it, I could wish that they would understand the idea of 'adding two variables before doing selection' (I mean, index selection in genetics only goes back to the 1940s or so, you can't expect people to understand such cutting-edge concepts). And he can't provide those references because it's not true: the genetic correlations between IQ and other traits are pervasively positive, and Kelly would know that if he spent any time looking into it. In fact, you would have to go thoroughly through the list of known genetic correlations with IQ before you would find any that are bad, contrary to his assertion that there is always a strong tradeoff in a myriad of ways. (I'll save you the effort: out of hundreds of reasonably reliable genetic correlations of IQ/gf with other traits like diseases, the bad ones worth mentioning are myopia, possibly allergies (I forget if that was just phenotypic), anorexia, and autism spectrum disorder checklist self-reports. And I think the last one is probably bogus anyway due to measurement issues.)
acadapter 3y ago
The genetics of color blindness is by nature unfairly biased against men. Hope we can dedicate ourselves to fix these things instead of financing more weapons and armies. I mean, a CRISPR based cure has been successfully tested in monkeys as early as 2010, but there is still nothing on the market.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Color blindness isn't fatal and its effect on quality of life is light to moderate. CRISPR is a fairly dangerous technology and it makes sense to start applying it to serious conditions first. If you accidentally kill someone trying to cure their color blindness, the whole humanity will lose out, because the regulators will go crazy and slow down the field by 10 more years.
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    True, but either way, we would have eliminated one case of color blindness! Satirical answer obviously. But the “right” risk level for human experimentation is such a strange problem. I expect that just as humans generally fear air travel mishaps far more than far more dangerous activities, we have an aversion to (informed consent) human experiments that is probably too conservative. Except when we take into account the real and damaging second order effects of outsized fear.
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      The case of Jesse Gelsinger comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger The victim was a young kid which had 50+ years of life before him, and he was able to manage his condition fairly well prior to the experiment. Add some shady details in the informed consent process, and the reaction of the public to his death was so overwhelmingly negative that gene therapy took a massive hit.

18 points by flobosg 3y ago

chr1 3y ago

A very important part of this frontier is ability to create genetic copies to see which part of a trait is genetic. It is crazy that we ban research on cloning, and still don't have many clones of successful scientists.

calepayson 3y ago
I think we put too much weight on intelligence as the factor differentiating innovators from the rest. If we were to clone some great scientists from the past I believe would be underwhelmed. Not because these aren’t brilliant people but because brilliance isn’t the most important factor in innovation. Rather, innovation is driven by people who are exposed to a novel environment and are just smart enough to not ignore it. Bill Gates’ highschool was the only one in the US with a computer. Albert Einstein was working in a patent office where he saw a conga-line of patents discussing how to standardize the measurement of time across vast geographies. Both brilliant people. Both exposed to a novel societal idea. Thankfully they were smart enough to run with it.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  > but because brilliance isn’t the most important factor in innovation I suspect having at least moderately wealthy parents is a huge factor. I'm sure a lot of potentially great scientists died unknown for absence of those.
  - lumost 3y ago
    Aye - having the choice to not take the economically best action is a unique one. On average you would expect this to be born out in most academic fields where the researcher either comes from a background enabling their exploration on economically viable terms - or academia is surprisingly the most economic choice.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago
  >Albert Einstein was working in a patent office where he saw a conga-line of patents discussing how to standardize the measurement of time across vast geographies. I don't thik this was a relevant factor. Certainly not as much as reading Poincare's work (which anyone had access to).
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
The issue with eugenics isn't the fundamental science, it's that the "elites" in charge of it are simply loaded with cognitive biases to support their (often inherited, arbitrary, or fortunate) positions. Almost all solutions to actually solving environmentalism and sustainability at a long term global level involve lots of complicated policies which seemingly can only be accomplished with a higher degrees of altruism, better intelligence of multiple flavors, etc. https://youtu.be/pRIIwJh1DDQ?t=165 https://youtu.be/pRIIwJh1DDQ?t=165 We kind of NEED a general increase to intellect and ability. Also would save on rising health care costs. Ironically, we'd need some sort of eugenics for the ruling elite to truly raise them to a point that they could then responsibly apply eugenics to the rest of the population. The "elite" will probably start doing this in the next 50 years. Honestly I'm shocked it hasn't started in my lifetime (I'm ~50 years old)
bigbillheck 3y ago
Seems like a better return on investment there would be to make sure everybody has access to nutrition, education, opportunity, and so on.
- Purplehermann 3y ago
  Depends how cheap gene editing gets. If you can mass-produce adenoviruses that improve iq 15 points and health significantly, that's going to be way cheaper than nutrition, forget education and of course opportunity. Of course, better genes means nutrition, education and opportunity go further
- chr1 3y ago
  No matter how well you eat and get educated, you are not going to be able to do even a fraction of what John von Neumann or Srinivasa Ramanujan were able to do. And very often people like them were able to do that despite all the odds, not because they had the best opportunities.
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    The point isn’t that everyone could be a von Neumann, given consistently good conditions. The point is that the world would benefit from even one more von Neumann. Which would also indicate the likelihood of a lot of other people achieving more than they would have under more adverse conditions.
    - chr1 3y ago
      On the contrary, it indicates that truly talented and capable people are rare. Having more of them would allow the rest of us to live under less adverse conditions, find a way to become smarter and live longer. The point is that we could have dozens of von Neumann's twin brothers helping us to speed up that process, but we choose not to for no good reason.
      - Nevermark 3y ago
        I think we agree then. Even one additional Von Neumann would be great. More would be fantastic. And would be associated with a lot of other more impactful people. The “good” reason for not providing better conditions is we don’t have a system for that. My vote would be that the value of all raw natural resources not created by human beings efforts be considered a joint inheritance. The raw value of them being shared by all equally with a focus on health and education for children, and keeping adults above survival mode. We would all benefit from that investment, even the rich. The efforts of those who extract and process them, as with any human added value, would be rewarded by the competitive marketplace as usual.

Traubenfuchs 3y ago

We could mass breed humans in conditions currently faced by pigs in high rise pig farms to brute force parts of this process. Not perfect for traits that require a nurturing and stimulating environment, but great for several health related ones, probably. Maybe stimulation could be provided through welded on VR equipment, AI companions and treadmills? I am sure there are plenty of ways to provide "fake" stimulation to those genetic research farm humans to increase the range of research possible. High rise pig farm: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-26-storey-pig-skyscraper-ready-to-produce-1-million-pigs-a-year https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/chinas-2...

throwanem 3y ago
> We could mass breed humans in conditions currently faced by pigs in high rise pig farms to brute force parts of this process. "Genetic engineering isn't progressing as quickly as I'd like. How could we solve that?...I know! Let's invent a slave race." I could just downvote and move on, and I probably should. But I find today I can't help asking: Do you hear yourself?
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago
  When hypothetically exploring fantastic but at least borderline feasible ideas, I like to turn off my moral and ethical filters. Exploring extreme, frightening, exciting, terrifying, sickening ideas, assuming I stand on the winners/good/not-bad side of things. It can be refreshing, almost exhilarating, depending on how strong you imagine it.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    You aren't the first to comment on the experience. Someone said once, it looks back. You should think about that.

paultopia 3y ago

given the eugenic flavor of all this, sort of feels less kk.org and more kkk.org

Purplehermann 3y ago
On the one hand yes, on the other I want to genetically engineer chickens to lay multiple purple eggs daily
- paultopia 3y ago
  yes, that would be awesome. Also, I want a bioluminescent cat[1] [1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-glow-in-the-dark-kitty-77372763/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-glow-in-th...

gwern 3y ago

> The challenge is the human proteins needed to make each of these to happen can conflict with each other. The proteins — created by the genes — needed for risk taking may be the ones that dampen good listening. There are genetic trade offs, in that you cannot optimize all traits. In other words there are genetic costs for each trait. To raise IQ might cost lowering something else, such as empathy. It’s not that there is a zero-sum quantity being conserved, it’s that genes cannot do all that is possible. They are hugely constrained by each other. It is like trying to design a machine: it cannot optimize all properties; it cannot be fastest, lightest, strongest, and cheapest at the same time. Everything is a trade off. Performance, reliability, speed, cost — all are trade off between them. Genes and traits also operate under the same regime of trade offs. There are no free lunches. Untrue.

Purplehermann 3y ago
While the author's framing is wrong, aren't there genes that have positive dominant effects and negative recessive effects?
inglor_cz 3y ago
"Untrue." Can you be more specific? This kind of smug response is worthy of Twitter, incapable of starting any deeper conversation on a pretty deep topic.
- Purplehermann 3y ago
  When things are just.. wrong, there's not much reason to be specific. Especially when gwern.net has multiple long-form blog posts discussing these topics
- gwern 3y ago
  Kelly is making extremely sweeping broad claims based on no evidence and flimsy analogies which are obviously wrong - humans are not carefully-engineered cars competing in a free market where cars could exist on a Pareto frontier (which itself would be a rather questionable claim...), they are organisms under a bombardment of mutations constantly happening and those mutations being very slowly purged by natural selection over thousands of generations. It is not surprising that there could be 'free lunches', anymore than it is surprising that there might be typos left in a file after a cat walked across your keyboard and you tried to fix it. I don't need to provide any references because Kelly didn't provide any of his own: what is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. I shouldn't be held to a higher standard than he is simply because he said his claims first. He's not a geneticist or psychologist or otherwise working in this area, so there shouldn't be even a presumption here that he is probably right if he isn't going to provide any evidence or sources or more convincing arguments than 'there just can't be free lunches, there can't!'. I am being rude here because I am fed up with decades of people making these sweeping assertions about genetic correlations while simply completely ignoring the large literature actually measuring these FUD bugaboos. Kelly, and everyone making those arguments, deserves nothing but mockery until they show any sign of catching up to the literature as of, let's say, 1990 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genetic_correlation&oldid=863326253#Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genetic_correlati...), and while we're at it, I could wish that they would understand the idea of 'adding two variables before doing selection' (I mean, index selection in genetics only goes back to the 1940s or so, you can't expect people to understand such cutting-edge concepts). And he can't provide those references because it's not true: the genetic correlations between IQ and other traits are pervasively positive, and Kelly would know that if he spent any time looking into it. In fact, you would have to go thoroughly through the list of known genetic correlations with IQ before you would find any that are bad, contrary to his assertion that there is always a strong tradeoff in a myriad of ways. (I'll save you the effort: out of hundreds of reasonably reliable genetic correlations of IQ/gf with other traits like diseases, the bad ones worth mentioning are myopia, possibly allergies (I forget if that was just phenotypic), anorexia, and autism spectrum disorder checklist self-reports. And I think the last one is probably bogus anyway due to measurement issues.)

acadapter 3y ago

The genetics of color blindness is by nature unfairly biased against men. Hope we can dedicate ourselves to fix these things instead of financing more weapons and armies. I mean, a CRISPR based cure has been successfully tested in monkeys as early as 2010, but there is still nothing on the market.

inglor_cz 3y ago
Color blindness isn't fatal and its effect on quality of life is light to moderate. CRISPR is a fairly dangerous technology and it makes sense to start applying it to serious conditions first. If you accidentally kill someone trying to cure their color blindness, the whole humanity will lose out, because the regulators will go crazy and slow down the field by 10 more years.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  True, but either way, we would have eliminated one case of color blindness! Satirical answer obviously. But the “right” risk level for human experimentation is such a strange problem. I expect that just as humans generally fear air travel mishaps far more than far more dangerous activities, we have an aversion to (informed consent) human experiments that is probably too conservative. Except when we take into account the real and damaging second order effects of outsized fear.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    The case of Jesse Gelsinger comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger The victim was a young kid which had 50+ years of life before him, and he was able to manage his condition fairly well prior to the experiment. Add some shady details in the informed consent process, and the reaction of the public to his death was so overwhelmingly negative that gene therapy took a massive hit.