Herasight Health is Herasight’s new “health only” product that is less expensive than their standard $50k product, but doesn’t include screening for IQ,
Noting that this is a red flag, according to me. Acknowledging that this easy for me to say as someone who is not trying to make a startup work, I think it’s bad for reprogenetics clinics in general to be withholding something major like IQ screening from the (“mere”) $20k customers.
This is much more important in the long run compared to the short run, so assuming this is a temporary thing that will change soon, it’s not that big of a deal. I’ve always assumed that, initially, advanced reprotech will be quite expensive, and wealthy people will get access first, and then over time the price will drop due to innovation; and furthermore, innovation includes paying off previous expenditures for research, as well as innovation in building out the business in general (not just the science).
However, a big part of the social contract around reprogenetics is that it will be maximally accessible in the long-run, and in particular, it won’t create increasing inequality due to economically important traits like intelligence being hoarded. For this reason, assuming it’s the case that IQ screening is basically zero additional marginal cost (for a client who’s already purchasing the Health product), and given that IQ is such an important trait, the lion’s share of the benefits of IQ screening should be made as accessible as possible as soon as possible. I think that making a sharp cutoff, where anyone below the $50k level gets no IQ screening, is probably unnecessary (admitting that I don’t actually know the business situation) and is probably too costly in terms of acting out what appear to be the beginnings of a bad longer-term policy.
Even if the business situation does make a sharp cutoff necessary for now, that would be hard for outsiders to know; and in any case, I would like to apply societal pressure to reprogenetics clinics to get rid of the cutoff ASAP. In general, there should be a culture of innovation and accessibility.
(To be clear, it’s not solely the fact that it’s zero marginal cost; it seems perfectly fine for a company to make money by charging for access to software etc. But IQ specifically, as well as the largest expected impact diseases, shouldn’t be sharply withheld.)
It seems, from the sidelines, like there should be a lot of options whereby a reprogenetics company could upsell to people with money. Besides the normal stuff (concierge and custom service, better sequencing and phenotyping, etc.), they could e.g. offer the most up-to-date IQ predictors in the most expensive product, and have a previous open-source model used for the less expensive product that gets most but not all of the predictive power.
Noting that this is a red flag, according to me. Acknowledging that this easy for me to say as someone who is not trying to make a startup work, I think it’s bad for reprogenetics clinics in general to be withholding something major like IQ screening from the (“mere”) $20k customers.
This is much more important in the long run compared to the short run, so assuming this is a temporary thing that will change soon, it’s not that big of a deal. I’ve always assumed that, initially, advanced reprotech will be quite expensive, and wealthy people will get access first, and then over time the price will drop due to innovation; and furthermore, innovation includes paying off previous expenditures for research, as well as innovation in building out the business in general (not just the science).
However, a big part of the social contract around reprogenetics is that it will be maximally accessible in the long-run, and in particular, it won’t create increasing inequality due to economically important traits like intelligence being hoarded. For this reason, assuming it’s the case that IQ screening is basically zero additional marginal cost (for a client who’s already purchasing the Health product), and given that IQ is such an important trait, the lion’s share of the benefits of IQ screening should be made as accessible as possible as soon as possible. I think that making a sharp cutoff, where anyone below the $50k level gets no IQ screening, is probably unnecessary (admitting that I don’t actually know the business situation) and is probably too costly in terms of acting out what appear to be the beginnings of a bad longer-term policy.
Even if the business situation does make a sharp cutoff necessary for now, that would be hard for outsiders to know; and in any case, I would like to apply societal pressure to reprogenetics clinics to get rid of the cutoff ASAP. In general, there should be a culture of innovation and accessibility.
(To be clear, it’s not solely the fact that it’s zero marginal cost; it seems perfectly fine for a company to make money by charging for access to software etc. But IQ specifically, as well as the largest expected impact diseases, shouldn’t be sharply withheld.)
It seems, from the sidelines, like there should be a lot of options whereby a reprogenetics company could upsell to people with money. Besides the normal stuff (concierge and custom service, better sequencing and phenotyping, etc.), they could e.g. offer the most up-to-date IQ predictors in the most expensive product, and have a previous open-source model used for the less expensive product that gets most but not all of the predictive power.