Have people thought much about the social consequences of this?
I mean, people produced through mature iterated embryo selection (or actual genetic editing) would be geniuses and more athletic and conscientious. Now this in itself is not necessarily that new. We have geniuses today. But there would be more and they might be smarter than today’s geniuses, so the variance in the population would rise. Steve Hsu has speculated that in theory you could make someone with a 900 IQ!
Edit: Actually, the correct figure was 100 + 30*15 = 550.
Edit 2: Still wrong. 100+30*10=400 seems true to Hsu’s idea, though I agree with Carl below that it’s likely to overestimate.
William Gardner thinks that credentials would probably reflect ability more since innate differences would be more obvious. So you would get less social mobility.
There is another side effect that John Maxwell IV points out and which I haven’t seen discussed much: these people might not be genetically related to anyone else. What does society look like when Harvard is filled with genius “adopted” kids, and people who want genetically related children can no longer hope for them to lead? Does today’s social elite just accept kids with a lower rank? Also, do religious or other traditional folks accept a social agenda maybe set by people who relate less, or not at all, to the kinship bonds that many religions emphasize? Or do we get separatism or war?
The big potential pluses of these technologies for people alive today look to me like network effects and externalities from being geographically near enhanced populations. But with separatism these effects go away and you are left with probably lesser impacts like gains from international trade.
In general I’d like to make a list of pros and cons. I have a feeling that many Less Wrong folks take the “pro” side. (Or am I wrong and most just think this is completely inevitable and so not worth debating or having a position on?)
For someone on the “pro” side: is your biggest reason wealth for (young) people alive today? Or is it altruism—creating minds that would be capable of better experiences or more meaningful pleasures from a utilitarian viewpoint? How do you answer my other questions here?
Steve Hsu has speculated that in theory you could make someone with a 900 IQ!
Hsu cited genetic distance measures suggesting that with respect to common additive genetic effects on IQ, there were 30-40 SNP differences per standard deviation of measured IQ difference. Since the standard deviation should go with the square root of the number of sites, he speculated that one might theoretically get 30-40 deviations of additive genetic effects, citing animal breeding successes that produced changes like that for milk production or the like.
But you should not be placing high credence on 800 points of IQ gains.
First, 40 standard deviations of IQ would be 600 points, and that’s the high end estimate from a noisy measurement.
Second, the standard deviation of additive genetic influences is smaller than the phenotypic standard deviation (including environment, non-additive variation, etc), more like 10 points than 15.
Third, additivity often results from low frequencies of alleles (2 copies don’t give twice the effect of 1, but if the frequency is low, then aggregate results are dominated by lone copies), including low frequencies of several alleles at different loci with similar effects on the same pathway.
Fourth, the animal examples of intensive breeding are for traits that were not valuable in the wild: producing extreme amounts of milk, eggs, or meat at the expense of the ability to survive in the wild. It looks like there was more selection for easy wins in intelligence than for those farm animal traits. Gains could be had from relaxed constraints on energy use and the like (see Bostrom’s wisdom of nature paper), but generalizations from deformed farm animals bear only so much weight.
people might not be genetically related to anyone else
A large set of donors would be their great-great...-grand-parents genetically, and people really do love their adoptive parents, or parents who used donor sperm and eggs.
The big potential pluses of these technologies for people alive today look to me like network effects and externalities from being geographically near enhanced populations. But with separatism these effects go away and you are left with probably lesser impacts like gains from international trade.
Why imagine separatism? Singapore, which has one of the smartest governing elites, is unusually open to low-skill guest workers, and generally smarter people are less xenophobic. Countries with higher income, education, and test scores contribute more to global public goods, give more foreign aid, and take more immigrants.
Re impacts, you’re leaving out the impact on global technological and institutional development, production of information goods (pharmaceuticals, entertainment, designs, software), as well as resolution of global catastrophic risks, which affect people everywhere.
Have people thought much about the social consequences of this?
I mean, people produced through mature iterated embryo selection (or actual genetic editing) would be geniuses and more athletic and conscientious. Now this in itself is not necessarily that new. We have geniuses today. But there would be more and they might be smarter than today’s geniuses, so the variance in the population would rise. Steve Hsu has speculated that in theory you could make someone with a 900 IQ!
Edit: Actually, the correct figure was 100 + 30*15 = 550.
Edit 2: Still wrong. 100+30*10=400 seems true to Hsu’s idea, though I agree with Carl below that it’s likely to overestimate.
William Gardner thinks that credentials would probably reflect ability more since innate differences would be more obvious. So you would get less social mobility.
There is another side effect that John Maxwell IV points out and which I haven’t seen discussed much: these people might not be genetically related to anyone else. What does society look like when Harvard is filled with genius “adopted” kids, and people who want genetically related children can no longer hope for them to lead? Does today’s social elite just accept kids with a lower rank? Also, do religious or other traditional folks accept a social agenda maybe set by people who relate less, or not at all, to the kinship bonds that many religions emphasize? Or do we get separatism or war?
The big potential pluses of these technologies for people alive today look to me like network effects and externalities from being geographically near enhanced populations. But with separatism these effects go away and you are left with probably lesser impacts like gains from international trade.
In general I’d like to make a list of pros and cons. I have a feeling that many Less Wrong folks take the “pro” side. (Or am I wrong and most just think this is completely inevitable and so not worth debating or having a position on?)
For someone on the “pro” side: is your biggest reason wealth for (young) people alive today? Or is it altruism—creating minds that would be capable of better experiences or more meaningful pleasures from a utilitarian viewpoint? How do you answer my other questions here?
Hsu cited genetic distance measures suggesting that with respect to common additive genetic effects on IQ, there were 30-40 SNP differences per standard deviation of measured IQ difference. Since the standard deviation should go with the square root of the number of sites, he speculated that one might theoretically get 30-40 deviations of additive genetic effects, citing animal breeding successes that produced changes like that for milk production or the like.
But you should not be placing high credence on 800 points of IQ gains.
First, 40 standard deviations of IQ would be 600 points, and that’s the high end estimate from a noisy measurement.
Second, the standard deviation of additive genetic influences is smaller than the phenotypic standard deviation (including environment, non-additive variation, etc), more like 10 points than 15.
Third, additivity often results from low frequencies of alleles (2 copies don’t give twice the effect of 1, but if the frequency is low, then aggregate results are dominated by lone copies), including low frequencies of several alleles at different loci with similar effects on the same pathway.
Fourth, the animal examples of intensive breeding are for traits that were not valuable in the wild: producing extreme amounts of milk, eggs, or meat at the expense of the ability to survive in the wild. It looks like there was more selection for easy wins in intelligence than for those farm animal traits. Gains could be had from relaxed constraints on energy use and the like (see Bostrom’s wisdom of nature paper), but generalizations from deformed farm animals bear only so much weight.
A large set of donors would be their great-great...-grand-parents genetically, and people really do love their adoptive parents, or parents who used donor sperm and eggs.
Why imagine separatism? Singapore, which has one of the smartest governing elites, is unusually open to low-skill guest workers, and generally smarter people are less xenophobic. Countries with higher income, education, and test scores contribute more to global public goods, give more foreign aid, and take more immigrants.
Re impacts, you’re leaving out the impact on global technological and institutional development, production of information goods (pharmaceuticals, entertainment, designs, software), as well as resolution of global catastrophic risks, which affect people everywhere.