first, thank you very much for engaging with my comment.
second, i made a major mistake in my first comment which has caused some confusion, i used “personality” as a synonym for “values” probably because my brain thought personality->value so personality==value and i believe that someones values is their most fundamental property that defines them as a unique person which is what i usually mean by personality.
so things like “liking math” counted as personality trait in my head while things like “will power” didn’t.
i have edited the comment for clarification, just replace personality with values and my position should make more sense.
now let me clarify my moral position, i am a pluralist in the sense that i believe that all possible sets of values are equally valid in so far as they don’t negatively effect other sets of values.
so for example someone who likes math, anime and cats has the same claim to moral value as some one who likes chess, music and practices Buddhism, no one set of values is superior to another with the exception of values that include negatively effecting other peoples values either by destroying said values or forcibly changing them or preventing such values from ever existing, for example the serial killer who enjoys torturing his victims to death or the religious fanatic who forcible converts people to his faith through violence and indoctrination or a hypothetical dictator who enforces a eugenics policy that causes the next generation to be incapable of enjoying music.
this view in my opinion is the best common ground we have available, since it allows the largest possible subset of “values” to exist in harmony, most value systems can adopt this simple common ground without relinquishing their own values
“As I argued, it’s not clear to me how it’s better to have my personality traits set by random genetic dice, or by weird alien optimization pressures coming from bioevolution and from Moloch-style human sociobiological pressures. There’s no “fair” / “neutral” / “pure” background default. (I do think there’s significant nuance here, but overall the conclusion stands. Happy to discuss.)”
absent an objective criteria for which values to promote we should default to randomly selecting values from the space of possible values since this is the only policy that guarantees impartiality, so ideally, all possible jacks and sallys should have an equal chance at existing, making this a fair background default of sorts.
of course this ideal is impossible to achieve, peoples values aren’t fixed nor are they unaffected by their environment and upbringing, their is also the fact that certain values depend on each other for examples sadists need masochists to feel sexually fulfilled.
also their is civilizations stake in all this, we need highly intelligent and competent individuals to be interested in certain fields like math and science and medicine to ensure human survival and flourishing.
and then we have the fact that genes are limited by what evolution has already made with certain values like enjoying food being more common then foe example enjoying math, plus the fact that the parent are entitled to have their own specific sub set of genes passed on which comes with it’s own set of biases.
but this is an ideal to strive for and not necessarily achieved, just because you can’t get a perfect solution doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, even reducing the influence of the environment by just 10% and increase diversity by 5% is a goal to be pursued.
“What’s the moral distinction between genetic vs. environment/parenting effects on children’s personalities?”
the distinction is that genetic effects are more permanent and less reversible then environmental effects, you can escape indoctrination, but you can’t rewire your brain at will.
plus genetics are heritable while indoctrination isn’t so you are running the risk of accidentally creating a race of value pessimizers.
more importantly this isn’t about eradicating the influence of culture and parenting, but merely limiting it to allow diverse values to naturally emerge, we shouldn’t give parents a tool that helps them to mold children into any value they please, even if said tool isn’t perfect.
“Are you also saying parents should not, for example, try to nudge their children, through behavior, to be more kind, wise, brave, perseverant, etc.?”
some of those traits like wisdom, kindness and bravery (not recklessness) are a net positive to most possible values so they fall into the same category as intelligence enhancement, i am in favor of those.
my problem is when parents impose traits that they believe are net positive while in reality they aren’t, think of a greek father telling his children that it is right and proper to enslave barbarians.
if it is possible to install those values on a genetic level it would be extremely difficult to remove or contain them.
“But part of what we’re doing here is figuring out how to make a political coalition, and a political stance—that is, a group stance that society as a whole can take—that should be very desirable to most and acceptable to nearly all.”
i feel like my version of of pluralism could fit the bill, what do you think?
“I think clinics shouldn’t offer “make your kid super obedient”, and I think most of them wouldn’t. Though, I don’t know. (Reminder: “make your kid super obedient” is not something we know how to do, I’d guess not something we’ll soon know how to do, and not even obviously doable any time in the foreseeable future.)”
why not just nip the problem in the bud by banning this particular line of research? why risk it?
“Personality is less heritable and harder to modify than IQ and many disease traits. This means that for the time being, the profile of traits we can affect is more unambiguously good.”
honestly i was under the impression that “personality” is easy to influence because of a twin study on the heritability of personality traits (i can’t find that particular study for some reason) , but that is besides the point, the point is changing someones IQ doesn’t have a strong direct and controllable effect on the child’s future choice of values, i am against interventions that could directly alter someones values or indirectly through their personality especially if the final outcome is predictable.
and again, why not nip the problem in the bud?
“So Sally1 in a sense can speak for herself, even without Sally2. She must be informed of her parents’s genomic choices for her, and then (with her randomly low OQ) can be outraged and say so. This does pose quite an interesting problem though—how to weigh different voices from children who had some type of genomic choice made for them.”
this is an interesting one, for starters the main issue is that sally2 values were never given a fair chance to exist in sally1′s unlike sally2′s world which gave sally1′s values a fair chance, but also sally1 may not be able to speak for herself.
people who are high on conformity my fail to express their true desires and values in fear of being ostracized by their community, this is why it is hard to verify cases of child abuse and cult brainwashing, in a sense sally1 my have been effectively silenced, that is why any genetic alterations to the conformity trait are particular insidious, if nothing else at least those should be banned to prevent silencing.
“I’m going to be reading the first part of this essay in about an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XllhegEy1K8 I estimate I’ll be done very roughly around 12:50 Pacific Time, at which point I’ll take questions or chat with anyone who wants. If you like, you could jump in and we could have a chat about your thoughts. I think your intuitions are only partially worked-out, or at least I only partially understand them, so I’d be interested in discussing (or debating), to help you and/or me understand your thoughts better.”
thanks for the offer but i can’t, though if you want we can chat on discord or telegram, just DM me and we will arrange something just not right now, i need to get some sleep.
final note i don’t know how to do proper quotation so i just use copy paste.
Anyway, I think it’s going to be pretty hard to engage by text on this, because it seems like you’re coming with background assumptions that are either misconceptions, or at least very different from where I’m coming from. So the right way to have this conversation would be synchronously, so we can clarify things quickly. Purely as an example, to illustrate that general fact, you say
if it is possible to install those values on a genetic level it would be extremely difficult to remove or contain them.
I don’t know what you mean by “contain” them. And I don’t see what you could mean by “difficult to remove”—if you can genomically vector a future child to go from a trait value of X1 to X2, it is (usually, roughly) equally easy to go from X2 to X1.
>Anyway, I think it’s going to be pretty hard to engage by text on this, because it seems like you’re coming with background assumptions that are either misconceptions, or at least very different from where I’m coming from.
yeah i agree we probably can’t resolve our differences with text alone and we both clearly have different starting assumptions
if is any help to know when i first wrote my replies i was running on the assumption that “personality” was strongly heritable, something like 70% though this meta analysis.....
..… puts it at 40% with the rest being environment.
still 40% is pretty bad especially when you control the environment so i am still worried, getting bad actors 40% of the way there is a bad idea.
i also assumed that the technology would be very easy to adopt legally or not and that bad actors around the world would absolutely jump at the idea of having designer babies aligned to their values.
i don’t know what your assumptions are but they don’t seem to match mine.
> So the right way to have this conversation would be synchronously, so we can clarify things quickly.
again, you can DM me if you want and we will arrange something.
i am thinking about writing a post discussing possible s risk scenarios for human germ line engineering and possible ways to avoid them and i would love your feedback on it either way, or you might change my mind all together.
>I don’t know what you mean by “contain” them. And I don’t see what you could mean by “difficult to remove”—if you can genomically vector a future child to go from a trait value of X1 to X2, it is (usually, roughly) equally easy to go from X2 to X1.
by “difficult to remove” i mean they might have negative values (eg like violence and bigotry) built into them on the genetic and psychological level that are nearly impossible to remove.
if you have a group of children who have been psychological indoctrinated to feel hostility and moral disgust at a perceived out group you could probably bring them back to sanity by removing them from their previous environment and cultivating whatever shreds of human empathy they must still have, the only real challenge is verifying that the child has been abused and taking custody of it.
if they were manipulated purely on the genetic level to feel moral disgust much more strongly then normal but were otherwise raised in a healthy environment they might consciously disapprove of those feelings and consent to have it be altered through drugs or in the future through genetic engineering (think of the schizophrenic who consciously declares they want to be sanity when they are sober).
but both at the same time? this would make aligning the children trivial, the child now is far more likely to internalize those values at a young age no matter how detrimental they are to society and refuse to have them changed like an AI refusing to have their utility function altered, worst yet they might insist that their children should carry those values as well like an AI trying to align its successor.
and good luck convincing the parents to relinquish their “right” to forcibly align their children with their own set of beliefs and values.
as for “difficult to contain” once the tech is cheap and wide spread (which should be one of our goals otherwise we well risk creating a genetic elite class) it would be difficult if not impossible to stop dubious individuals from getting children of any personality or disposition they want, legally or not.
and once they are indoctrinated and grown up there isn’t much we can do, as far as society is concerned they are consenting adults.
in a dictatorship this can manifest in the population suddenly becoming more receptive to “the great leaders” vision, more loyal more diligent and more fanatical, even if you topple said dictatorship in the future it might prove impossible to reintegrate the population into the rest of civilization, at least not with their consent.
in the more civilized world this will manifest in some pockets of society becoming unusually conservatives with more and more children adopting their parents religious beliefs /political positions/moral values, those children in turn want their children to be aligned with their values in a positive feedback loop, and before you know it where we used to seeing family members with diverse interests, a father how likes math here a daughter how likes art their, we now see dynasties of semi clones with identical personalities and values.
this is bad even if the values that those dynasties chose are random, plurality is a fragile thing, by default people tend to stick to their tribe/nation/family values and beliefs and try to forcibly convert or destroy anyone who disagrees (think the communist purges, the holy crusades, the genocide of the native Americans) not because they want to but because the ones that do tend to survive and prosper then kill the ones that don’t.
this didn’t happen yet because evolution forbids that through mutation, incest taboos and its general inability to fine tone the human brain (otherwise we wouldn’t have invented super stimulus nor birth control) but with genetic engineering this might become uncomfortably easy to do.
just look up the genetic codes of people with the desired personalities/values, locate the similarities and crank them up in your child.
again i think we should just ban research into the genetic components of personality before its to late, intelligent enhancement and disease prevention is cool and all but any research into the genetic components of personality is just to risky.
(Had a good conversation—will think more about the request to ban research into certain personality traits (the traits that an oppressive regime could force upon its populace to enforce long-term subjugation).)
Personality traits are especially nasty a danger because given the existence of: stabilizing selection + non-additive variance + high social homogamy/assortative mating + many personality traits with substantial heritability, you can probably create extreme self-sustaining non-coercive population structure with a package of edits. I should probably write some more about this because I think that embryo selection doesn’t create this danger (or in general result in the common fear of ‘speciation’), but embryo editing/synthesis does.
Interesting. (I don’t immediately see where you’re going with that, so sounds like I have something to learn!)
In practical terms, it should be feasible sooner to do small amounts of personality nudging using what data we already have, operating on linear variance. Later on we’ll have more data, better psychometrics, and better ways of modeling some of the nonlinear effects. My current take is that it’s better to use the weaker versions while the strong ones are infeasible (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rdbqmyohYJwwxyeEt/genomic-emancipation#Genomic_engineering_overhang), but not sure.
still 40% is pretty bad especially when you control the environment so i am still worried, getting bad actors 40% of the way there is a bad idea.
Ok, but that study, at a glance, seems to be about personality models in the vein of Big Five (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits). This matches how I interpreted your discussion of “personality”, which you later said actually you meant to discuss “values”—are you now trying to discuss personality, or values? I though you said you’re ok with genomically vectoring personality but not values?
first, thank you very much for engaging with my comment.
second, i made a major mistake in my first comment which has caused some confusion, i used “personality” as a synonym for “values” probably because my brain thought personality->value so personality==value and i believe that someones values is their most fundamental property that defines them as a unique person which is what i usually mean by personality.
so things like “liking math” counted as personality trait in my head while things like “will power” didn’t.
i have edited the comment for clarification, just replace personality with values and my position should make more sense.
now let me clarify my moral position, i am a pluralist in the sense that i believe that all possible sets of values are equally valid in so far as they don’t negatively effect other sets of values.
so for example someone who likes math, anime and cats has the same claim to moral value as some one who likes chess, music and practices Buddhism, no one set of values is superior to another with the exception of values that include negatively effecting other peoples values either by destroying said values or forcibly changing them or preventing such values from ever existing, for example the serial killer who enjoys torturing his victims to death or the religious fanatic who forcible converts people to his faith through violence and indoctrination or a hypothetical dictator who enforces a eugenics policy that causes the next generation to be incapable of enjoying music.
this view in my opinion is the best common ground we have available, since it allows the largest possible subset of “values” to exist in harmony, most value systems can adopt this simple common ground without relinquishing their own values
“As I argued, it’s not clear to me how it’s better to have my personality traits set by random genetic dice, or by weird alien optimization pressures coming from bioevolution and from Moloch-style human sociobiological pressures. There’s no “fair” / “neutral” / “pure” background default. (I do think there’s significant nuance here, but overall the conclusion stands. Happy to discuss.)”
absent an objective criteria for which values to promote we should default to randomly selecting values from the space of possible values since this is the only policy that guarantees impartiality, so ideally, all possible jacks and sallys should have an equal chance at existing, making this a fair background default of sorts.
of course this ideal is impossible to achieve, peoples values aren’t fixed nor are they unaffected by their environment and upbringing, their is also the fact that certain values depend on each other for examples sadists need masochists to feel sexually fulfilled.
also their is civilizations stake in all this, we need highly intelligent and competent individuals to be interested in certain fields like math and science and medicine to ensure human survival and flourishing.
and then we have the fact that genes are limited by what evolution has already made with certain values like enjoying food being more common then foe example enjoying math, plus the fact that the parent are entitled to have their own specific sub set of genes passed on which comes with it’s own set of biases.
but this is an ideal to strive for and not necessarily achieved, just because you can’t get a perfect solution doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, even reducing the influence of the environment by just 10% and increase diversity by 5% is a goal to be pursued.
“What’s the moral distinction between genetic vs. environment/parenting effects on children’s personalities?”
the distinction is that genetic effects are more permanent and less reversible then environmental effects, you can escape indoctrination, but you can’t rewire your brain at will.
plus genetics are heritable while indoctrination isn’t so you are running the risk of accidentally creating a race of value pessimizers.
more importantly this isn’t about eradicating the influence of culture and parenting, but merely limiting it to allow diverse values to naturally emerge, we shouldn’t give parents a tool that helps them to mold children into any value they please, even if said tool isn’t perfect.
“Are you also saying parents should not, for example, try to nudge their children, through behavior, to be more kind, wise, brave, perseverant, etc.?”
some of those traits like wisdom, kindness and bravery (not recklessness) are a net positive to most possible values so they fall into the same category as intelligence enhancement, i am in favor of those.
my problem is when parents impose traits that they believe are net positive while in reality they aren’t, think of a greek father telling his children that it is right and proper to enslave barbarians.
if it is possible to install those values on a genetic level it would be extremely difficult to remove or contain them.
“But part of what we’re doing here is figuring out how to make a political coalition, and a political stance—that is, a group stance that society as a whole can take—that should be very desirable to most and acceptable to nearly all.”
i feel like my version of of pluralism could fit the bill, what do you think?
“I think clinics shouldn’t offer “make your kid super obedient”, and I think most of them wouldn’t. Though, I don’t know. (Reminder: “make your kid super obedient” is not something we know how to do, I’d guess not something we’ll soon know how to do, and not even obviously doable any time in the foreseeable future.)”
why not just nip the problem in the bud by banning this particular line of research? why risk it?
“Personality is less heritable and harder to modify than IQ and many disease traits. This means that for the time being, the profile of traits we can affect is more unambiguously good.”
honestly i was under the impression that “personality” is easy to influence because of a twin study on the heritability of personality traits (i can’t find that particular study for some reason) , but that is besides the point, the point is changing someones IQ doesn’t have a strong direct and controllable effect on the child’s future choice of values, i am against interventions that could directly alter someones values or indirectly through their personality especially if the final outcome is predictable.
and again, why not nip the problem in the bud?
“So Sally1 in a sense can speak for herself, even without Sally2. She must be informed of her parents’s genomic choices for her, and then (with her randomly low OQ) can be outraged and say so. This does pose quite an interesting problem though—how to weigh different voices from children who had some type of genomic choice made for them.”
this is an interesting one, for starters the main issue is that sally2 values were never given a fair chance to exist in sally1′s unlike sally2′s world which gave sally1′s values a fair chance, but also sally1 may not be able to speak for herself.
people who are high on conformity my fail to express their true desires and values in fear of being ostracized by their community, this is why it is hard to verify cases of child abuse and cult brainwashing, in a sense sally1 my have been effectively silenced, that is why any genetic alterations to the conformity trait are particular insidious, if nothing else at least those should be banned to prevent silencing.
“I’m going to be reading the first part of this essay in about an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XllhegEy1K8 I estimate I’ll be done very roughly around 12:50 Pacific Time, at which point I’ll take questions or chat with anyone who wants. If you like, you could jump in and we could have a chat about your thoughts. I think your intuitions are only partially worked-out, or at least I only partially understand them, so I’d be interested in discussing (or debating), to help you and/or me understand your thoughts better.”
thanks for the offer but i can’t, though if you want we can chat on discord or telegram, just DM me and we will arrange something just not right now, i need to get some sleep.
final note i don’t know how to do proper quotation so i just use copy paste.
sorry but i am kinda new to this.
Edit: accidentally mixed sally1 with 2, fixed it.
You can put this: > some text
at the beginning of a line, and it looks like
Generally you can find info about editing text on LessWrong here: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/guide-to-the-lesswrong-editor
Anyway, I think it’s going to be pretty hard to engage by text on this, because it seems like you’re coming with background assumptions that are either misconceptions, or at least very different from where I’m coming from. So the right way to have this conversation would be synchronously, so we can clarify things quickly. Purely as an example, to illustrate that general fact, you say
I don’t know what you mean by “contain” them. And I don’t see what you could mean by “difficult to remove”—if you can genomically vector a future child to go from a trait value of X1 to X2, it is (usually, roughly) equally easy to go from X2 to X1.
>Anyway, I think it’s going to be pretty hard to engage by text on this, because it seems like you’re coming with background assumptions that are either misconceptions, or at least very different from where I’m coming from.
yeah i agree we probably can’t resolve our differences with text alone and we both clearly have different starting assumptions
if is any help to know when i first wrote my replies i was running on the assumption that “personality” was strongly heritable, something like 70% though this meta analysis.....
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25961374/
..… puts it at 40% with the rest being environment.
still 40% is pretty bad especially when you control the environment so i am still worried, getting bad actors 40% of the way there is a bad idea.
i also assumed that the technology would be very easy to adopt legally or not and that bad actors around the world would absolutely jump at the idea of having designer babies aligned to their values.
i don’t know what your assumptions are but they don’t seem to match mine.
> So the right way to have this conversation would be synchronously, so we can clarify things quickly.
again, you can DM me if you want and we will arrange something.
i am thinking about writing a post discussing possible s risk scenarios for human germ line engineering and possible ways to avoid them and i would love your feedback on it either way, or you might change my mind all together.
>I don’t know what you mean by “contain” them. And I don’t see what you could mean by “difficult to remove”—if you can genomically vector a future child to go from a trait value of X1 to X2, it is (usually, roughly) equally easy to go from X2 to X1.
by “difficult to remove” i mean they might have negative values (eg like violence and bigotry) built into them on the genetic and psychological level that are nearly impossible to remove.
if you have a group of children who have been psychological indoctrinated to feel hostility and moral disgust at a perceived out group you could probably bring them back to sanity by removing them from their previous environment and cultivating whatever shreds of human empathy they must still have, the only real challenge is verifying that the child has been abused and taking custody of it.
if they were manipulated purely on the genetic level to feel moral disgust much more strongly then normal but were otherwise raised in a healthy environment they might consciously disapprove of those feelings and consent to have it be altered through drugs or in the future through genetic engineering (think of the schizophrenic who consciously declares they want to be sanity when they are sober).
but both at the same time? this would make aligning the children trivial, the child now is far more likely to internalize those values at a young age no matter how detrimental they are to society and refuse to have them changed like an AI refusing to have their utility function altered, worst yet they might insist that their children should carry those values as well like an AI trying to align its successor.
and good luck convincing the parents to relinquish their “right” to forcibly align their children with their own set of beliefs and values.
as for “difficult to contain” once the tech is cheap and wide spread (which should be one of our goals otherwise we well risk creating a genetic elite class) it would be difficult if not impossible to stop dubious individuals from getting children of any personality or disposition they want, legally or not.
and once they are indoctrinated and grown up there isn’t much we can do, as far as society is concerned they are consenting adults.
in a dictatorship this can manifest in the population suddenly becoming more receptive to “the great leaders” vision, more loyal more diligent and more fanatical, even if you topple said dictatorship in the future it might prove impossible to reintegrate the population into the rest of civilization, at least not with their consent.
in the more civilized world this will manifest in some pockets of society becoming unusually conservatives with more and more children adopting their parents religious beliefs /political positions/moral values, those children in turn want their children to be aligned with their values in a positive feedback loop, and before you know it where we used to seeing family members with diverse interests, a father how likes math here a daughter how likes art their, we now see dynasties of semi clones with identical personalities and values.
this is bad even if the values that those dynasties chose are random, plurality is a fragile thing, by default people tend to stick to their tribe/nation/family values and beliefs and try to forcibly convert or destroy anyone who disagrees (think the communist purges, the holy crusades, the genocide of the native Americans) not because they want to but because the ones that do tend to survive and prosper then kill the ones that don’t.
this didn’t happen yet because evolution forbids that through mutation, incest taboos and its general inability to fine tone the human brain (otherwise we wouldn’t have invented super stimulus nor birth control) but with genetic engineering this might become uncomfortably easy to do.
just look up the genetic codes of people with the desired personalities/values, locate the similarities and crank them up in your child.
again i think we should just ban research into the genetic components of personality before its to late, intelligent enhancement and disease prevention is cool and all but any research into the genetic components of personality is just to risky.
(Had a good conversation—will think more about the request to ban research into certain personality traits (the traits that an oppressive regime could force upon its populace to enforce long-term subjugation).)
Personality traits are especially nasty a danger because given the existence of: stabilizing selection + non-additive variance + high social homogamy/assortative mating + many personality traits with substantial heritability, you can probably create extreme self-sustaining non-coercive population structure with a package of edits. I should probably write some more about this because I think that embryo selection doesn’t create this danger (or in general result in the common fear of ‘speciation’), but embryo editing/synthesis does.
Interesting. (I don’t immediately see where you’re going with that, so sounds like I have something to learn!)
In practical terms, it should be feasible sooner to do small amounts of personality nudging using what data we already have, operating on linear variance. Later on we’ll have more data, better psychometrics, and better ways of modeling some of the nonlinear effects. My current take is that it’s better to use the weaker versions while the strong ones are infeasible (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rdbqmyohYJwwxyeEt/genomic-emancipation#Genomic_engineering_overhang), but not sure.
Ok, but that study, at a glance, seems to be about personality models in the vein of Big Five (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits). This matches how I interpreted your discussion of “personality”, which you later said actually you meant to discuss “values”—are you now trying to discuss personality, or values? I though you said you’re ok with genomically vectoring personality but not values?