Thanks for bringing up positional arms races (the “don’t make your sons 6′8″” example), which hadn’t previously occurred to me in the context of reprogenetics.
You identify the problem clearly, but your own commitments seem to rule out every plausible mechanism for actually preventing it:
The state can’t intervene (genomic liberty)
Counselors shouldn’t steer choices (neutrality)
Society shouldn’t pressure specific choices (anti-soft-eugenics)
Choices should be private (privacy norms)
That leaves moral exhortation to individual parents, and well, the many examples of positional arms races throughout human history suggest that this alone is unlikely to work.
the many examples of positional arms races throughout human history suggest that this alone is unlikely to work.
Are there one or two examples that are most compelling to you on this point?
I agree, it’s a significant issue. In general, there’s a significant tension in my position: on one hand, I want to push decisions down to the most personal level that’s feasible; on the other hand, you can’t do that with every decision. Positional races are one issue; another issue is simply that some choices aren’t acceptable. A few notes:
I don’t feel satisfied with the below comments; I’m open to suggestions. Maybe there does have to be some kind of ban, though that seems pretty rough.
I’m not an absolutist about genomic liberty, and in general these principles shouldn’t be absolute, just like free speech shouldn’t be an absolute right. In other words, it’s fine for the state to intervene in certain genomic choices (only, or almost only, to prevent certain active changes). A fortiori, I’m not infinitely opposed to these other influences playing a substantive role. I think this is a necessary complication to the sort of norms I’m proposing. See https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/The_principle_of_genomic_liberty.html#exceptions-to-the-genomic-liberty-principle
My current weak guess for the least bad implementation is to keep the state out of it, but to have really strong professional norms for reprogenetic clinicians against pushing height really high. [ETA: glancing back at the essay, I also said that tall sons could be an exception for social stigma, i.e. it would be fine to stigmatize that choice. I guess at some point I could list a whole bunch of genomic choices and make up ideas of what sorts of pressures I think would be ok in that case, in order to figure out how / whether I’m actually applying my stated ideals.]
Generally, clinics should be refusing to do really dangerous genomic changes. So they should at least refuse to intentionally make a future child have a high chance of being, say, >7 feet (or whenever is some reasonable cutoff that carries too much disease risk). This doesn’t prevent some racing, but hopefully would at least provide a stopgap. If the really dangerous uses are being prevented, then the outcome doesn’t seem that bad to me in the grand scheme of things, compared to the overall benefits of reprogenetics, but it’s pretty bad.
On the other hand, letting the race get going could be adding more fuel to the fire because of FOMO and race dynamics. That argues for a stricter moratorium.
Drawing a line about height for purposes of regulation seems a bit awkward, or at least it would need some working out. How tall is too tall? What probabilistic distributions over heights are acceptable? Do we use changes in expected height, or change in probability of being above a threshold? How does this interact with the parental expected height?? (A natural answer would be about disease risk, but again, that still leaves a fair bit of headroom as it were.)
Enforcement would be awkward because there are many tradeoffs. What if a couple wants to select an especially tall son, but that’s because that embryo is significantly healthier (less diabetes risk, say) compared to their other embryos? (This problem can be innovated away; strong reprogenetics removes tradeoffs between biologically separate traits.)
Society should change to be somehow less heightist, lookist, etc., but this is pretty pie-in-the-sky.
Society should change to be somehow less arms racey. I’m not sure how pie-in-the-sky this is.
I’m imagining that there’s one or a few professional ethics/standards that reprogenetics clinics can hold to / qualify for. These would prohibit a clinic from intervening to make a future child to be likely to be 7″. This is de facto somewhat-centralized control. However, there are a couple things that make it relatively less bad compared to state control:
You can make a clinic that is out of norm. It will probably be a worse clinic, because fewer clinicians are willing to work with you and you’d have fewer clients, and clients would have to pay more / travel further. But at least it’s possible to get the out-of-norm treatment if you really want it. This is kinda like taxing cigarettes rather than banning them outright or being totally laissez faire. It feels a bit like “driving at half speed”; isn’t that genomic choice either acceptable or not? But I think maybe soft disincentives are better e.g. because they set up a regime that is at least somewhat responsive to the intensity of people’s private desires, simply because if you really want it you can still get it.
I think problems like the tall sons race are quantitative, so preventing most people from doing that addresses most of the problem. (Though it could be that you set off the arms race.)
It’s sort of “direct democracy” in a sense. If literally all clinics refuse to provide a service, that’s a strong indication that the service shouldn’t be provided—significantly stronger than some state process making that decision. In other words, it seems quite difficult to fully ban something unless it’s really bad.
A totally different kind of idea, sorta in the vein of the previous sub-bullet point, would be to take some sort of set of democratic direct referenda, specifically of the form “should the state ban genomic choice X”. And you only ban it if 95% of people say yes (or something).
Are there one or two examples that are most compelling to you on this point?
Chinese/Korean schools/parents giving their kids incredible amounts of homework/schoolwork. My understanding is that this is typical for a 13yo in China: “Hi guys, it’s 8:30pm, let’s go pick up Cindy together,” 42-year-old Ray Liu said. “She went to school this morning at 7 a.m., so she stayed at school for about 14 hours.”
Fashions in clothing/decorating/design, causing people to throw out perfectly usable clothes and remodel “outdated” kitchens and bathrooms.
Virtue signaling, which is inherently positional and also has a large “fashion” dynamic
Wars and other forms of power competition such as palace intrigues and AI race.
Looking this over, I think my top worries related to “positional arms races” are now:
People pushing their kids’ genomes in “fashionable” directions, potentially causing a variety of problems, foreseeable (reduced diversity, fashions often being costly or harmful, value drift as people use their kids’ genes to virtue signal in random directions) and unforeseeable.
An “IA race” where people/countries take too much risk in order to gain power and/or status based on IA.
I would expect that the problem of 6′8″ sons (and similar things) will be self-solving. Height confers status now because it demonstrates all manner of desirable qualities. It shows that someone had a healthy childhood, it demonstrates genes that have been able to optimize for strength rather than survival during times of famine, and it shows that someone is likely to do well in a fight. With genetic engineering, I’d expect that being marginally taller won’t be as desirable, because it won’t signify those things anymore.
People will still be taller than they are now, but height won’t be a reliable marker of ancestral success or upbringing quality anymore, and there’s an optimal height for fighting (let’s say it’s 6′2″, arbitrarily, but it exists somewhere), so physical dominance won’t drive an endless arms race towards ever taller heights either. Likely going for something higher than this optimum would be seen as tryhard, desperate, and tasteless, in the same way as over-the-top plastic surgeries are seen today—a sign of insecure parents.
Thanks for bringing up positional arms races (the “don’t make your sons 6′8″” example), which hadn’t previously occurred to me in the context of reprogenetics.
You identify the problem clearly, but your own commitments seem to rule out every plausible mechanism for actually preventing it:
The state can’t intervene (genomic liberty)
Counselors shouldn’t steer choices (neutrality)
Society shouldn’t pressure specific choices (anti-soft-eugenics)
Choices should be private (privacy norms)
That leaves moral exhortation to individual parents, and well, the many examples of positional arms races throughout human history suggest that this alone is unlikely to work.
Are there one or two examples that are most compelling to you on this point?
I agree, it’s a significant issue. In general, there’s a significant tension in my position: on one hand, I want to push decisions down to the most personal level that’s feasible; on the other hand, you can’t do that with every decision. Positional races are one issue; another issue is simply that some choices aren’t acceptable. A few notes:
I don’t feel satisfied with the below comments; I’m open to suggestions. Maybe there does have to be some kind of ban, though that seems pretty rough.
I’m not an absolutist about genomic liberty, and in general these principles shouldn’t be absolute, just like free speech shouldn’t be an absolute right. In other words, it’s fine for the state to intervene in certain genomic choices (only, or almost only, to prevent certain active changes). A fortiori, I’m not infinitely opposed to these other influences playing a substantive role. I think this is a necessary complication to the sort of norms I’m proposing. See https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/The_principle_of_genomic_liberty.html#exceptions-to-the-genomic-liberty-principle
My current weak guess for the least bad implementation is to keep the state out of it, but to have really strong professional norms for reprogenetic clinicians against pushing height really high. [ETA: glancing back at the essay, I also said that tall sons could be an exception for social stigma, i.e. it would be fine to stigmatize that choice. I guess at some point I could list a whole bunch of genomic choices and make up ideas of what sorts of pressures I think would be ok in that case, in order to figure out how / whether I’m actually applying my stated ideals.]
Generally, clinics should be refusing to do really dangerous genomic changes. So they should at least refuse to intentionally make a future child have a high chance of being, say, >7 feet (or whenever is some reasonable cutoff that carries too much disease risk). This doesn’t prevent some racing, but hopefully would at least provide a stopgap. If the really dangerous uses are being prevented, then the outcome doesn’t seem that bad to me in the grand scheme of things, compared to the overall benefits of reprogenetics, but it’s pretty bad.
On the other hand, letting the race get going could be adding more fuel to the fire because of FOMO and race dynamics. That argues for a stricter moratorium.
Drawing a line about height for purposes of regulation seems a bit awkward, or at least it would need some working out. How tall is too tall? What probabilistic distributions over heights are acceptable? Do we use changes in expected height, or change in probability of being above a threshold? How does this interact with the parental expected height?? (A natural answer would be about disease risk, but again, that still leaves a fair bit of headroom as it were.)
Enforcement would be awkward because there are many tradeoffs. What if a couple wants to select an especially tall son, but that’s because that embryo is significantly healthier (less diabetes risk, say) compared to their other embryos? (This problem can be innovated away; strong reprogenetics removes tradeoffs between biologically separate traits.)
Society should change to be somehow less heightist, lookist, etc., but this is pretty pie-in-the-sky.
Society should change to be somehow less arms racey. I’m not sure how pie-in-the-sky this is.
I’m imagining that there’s one or a few professional ethics/standards that reprogenetics clinics can hold to / qualify for. These would prohibit a clinic from intervening to make a future child to be likely to be 7″. This is de facto somewhat-centralized control. However, there are a couple things that make it relatively less bad compared to state control:
You can make a clinic that is out of norm. It will probably be a worse clinic, because fewer clinicians are willing to work with you and you’d have fewer clients, and clients would have to pay more / travel further. But at least it’s possible to get the out-of-norm treatment if you really want it. This is kinda like taxing cigarettes rather than banning them outright or being totally laissez faire. It feels a bit like “driving at half speed”; isn’t that genomic choice either acceptable or not? But I think maybe soft disincentives are better e.g. because they set up a regime that is at least somewhat responsive to the intensity of people’s private desires, simply because if you really want it you can still get it.
I think problems like the tall sons race are quantitative, so preventing most people from doing that addresses most of the problem. (Though it could be that you set off the arms race.)
It’s sort of “direct democracy” in a sense. If literally all clinics refuse to provide a service, that’s a strong indication that the service shouldn’t be provided—significantly stronger than some state process making that decision. In other words, it seems quite difficult to fully ban something unless it’s really bad.
A totally different kind of idea, sorta in the vein of the previous sub-bullet point, would be to take some sort of set of democratic direct referenda, specifically of the form “should the state ban genomic choice X”. And you only ban it if 95% of people say yes (or something).
In general, I would want society to get long-term feedback about how things are going with reprogenetics, and then course-correct if necessary. (Hence some of the importance of multi-generational feedback on reprogenetics: https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation.html#habermas-and-multigenerational-feedback )
Chinese/Korean schools/parents giving their kids incredible amounts of homework/schoolwork. My understanding is that this is typical for a 13yo in China: “Hi guys, it’s 8:30pm, let’s go pick up Cindy together,” 42-year-old Ray Liu said. “She went to school this morning at 7 a.m., so she stayed at school for about 14 hours.”
Fashions in clothing/decorating/design, causing people to throw out perfectly usable clothes and remodel “outdated” kitchens and bathrooms.
Virtue signaling, which is inherently positional and also has a large “fashion” dynamic
Wars and other forms of power competition such as palace intrigues and AI race.
Looking this over, I think my top worries related to “positional arms races” are now:
People pushing their kids’ genomes in “fashionable” directions, potentially causing a variety of problems, foreseeable (reduced diversity, fashions often being costly or harmful, value drift as people use their kids’ genes to virtue signal in random directions) and unforeseeable.
An “IA race” where people/countries take too much risk in order to gain power and/or status based on IA.
I would expect that the problem of 6′8″ sons (and similar things) will be self-solving. Height confers status now because it demonstrates all manner of desirable qualities. It shows that someone had a healthy childhood, it demonstrates genes that have been able to optimize for strength rather than survival during times of famine, and it shows that someone is likely to do well in a fight. With genetic engineering, I’d expect that being marginally taller won’t be as desirable, because it won’t signify those things anymore.
People will still be taller than they are now, but height won’t be a reliable marker of ancestral success or upbringing quality anymore, and there’s an optimal height for fighting (let’s say it’s 6′2″, arbitrarily, but it exists somewhere), so physical dominance won’t drive an endless arms race towards ever taller heights either. Likely going for something higher than this optimum would be seen as tryhard, desperate, and tasteless, in the same way as over-the-top plastic surgeries are seen today—a sign of insecure parents.