(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.
(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.