It’s just very hard for me to believe there aren’t huge gains possible from genetic engineering. It goes against everything we’ve seen from a millenia of animal breeding. It goes against the estimates we have for the fraction of variance that’s linear for all these highly polygenic traits. It goes against data we’ve seen from statisitcal outliers like Shawn Bradley, who shows up as a 4.6 standard deviation outlier in graphs of height:
Do I buy that things will get noisier around the tails, and that we might not be able to push very far outside the +5 SD mark or so? Sure. That seems unlikely, but plausible.
But the idea that you’re only going to be able to push traits by 2-3 standard deviations with gene editing before your predictor breaks down seems quite unlikely.
Maybe you’ve seen some evidence I haven’t in which case I would like to know why I should be more skeptical. But I haven’t seen such evidence so far.
It’s just very hard for me to believe there aren’t huge gains possible from genetic engineering. It goes against everything we’ve seen from a millenia of animal breeding. It goes against the estimates we have for the fraction of variance that’s linear for all these highly polygenic traits. It goes against data we’ve seen from statisitcal outliers like Shawn Bradley, who shows up as a 4.6 standard deviation outlier in graphs of height:
Do I buy that things will get noisier around the tails, and that we might not be able to push very far outside the +5 SD mark or so? Sure. That seems unlikely, but plausible.
But the idea that you’re only going to be able to push traits by 2-3 standard deviations with gene editing before your predictor breaks down seems quite unlikely.
Maybe you’ve seen some evidence I haven’t in which case I would like to know why I should be more skeptical. But I haven’t seen such evidence so far.