I think it’s morally important that we make this choice increasingly accessible, and fight any bigotry against children born with this method and bigotry against their parents. It would take a pretty niche moral stance and cost benefit analysis to make this morally imperative.
I suspect bigotry against children born this way would not work, just because they would be impossible to identify. (Presumably most of them would not even know themselves).
Although a future world where someone says: “phwa! You are only smarter and hotter because of gross polygenic screening your parents cheated into you.” Reply: “But, I am a lonely child selected from 4 embryos, you have 4 less successful siblings, so you are more selected than I am.”
Yes, I might write later about how to make this cheaper. Though what I would write may have limited relevance, as I expect gene editing methods to surpass simple embryo selection within the next ten years.
I’m not quite sure I would agree with this yet, though I can see the case being made for it.
I think it mostly comes down to how much you think you can improve worldwide outcomes by increasing the abilities of those at the top vs bringing up those with the least.
Iodine supplementation in the developing world, for example, is probably the single most cost-effective way of increasing average IQ per capita worldwide. It also helps prevent other problems like hypothyroidism.
So if just increasing IQ per capita is your goal, polygenic embryo selection is not going to come anywhere close to iodine supplementation.
Of course, iodine supplementation is not going to give you any more geniuses, and geniuses per capita has an incredibly strong impact on human progress.
I really, really wish we could just ban AI improvements and focus on enhancing human intelligence and morality for a few decades. The reason I originally became interested in embryo selection was that I thought that genetic engineering might be a potential solution to the alignment problem (not to mention many of the other problems the human species faces). But it’s going to take at least 20 years to work (and realistically more like 30-40) to have a large impact. I’d put the odds of us getting to AGI before that at like 90%. The only path I can see now involves a worldwide ban on AI capabilities improvements.
Suppose a family values the positive effects that screening would have on their child at $30,000, but in their area, it would cost them $50,000. Them paying for it anyway would be like “donating” $20,000 towards the moral imperative that you propose. But would that really be the best counterfactual use of the money? E.g. donating it instead to the Against Malaria Foundation would save 4-5 lives in expectation.[1] Maybe it would be worth it at $10,000? $5,000?
Although, this doesn’t take into account the idea that an additional person doing polygenic screening would increase its acceptance in the public, incentivizing companies to innovate and drive the price down. So maybe the knock-on effects would make it worth it.
I mostly agree with this perspective with regards to the “moral imperative”.
But apart from that, it seems to me that a good case can be made if we use personal health spending as a reference class.
Even if we only consider currently achievable DALY gains, it is quite notable that we have a method to gain several healthy life-years for a price of maybe $20,000/healthy year (and actually these gains should even be heritable themselves!).
I do not know the numbers for common health interventions, but this should already be somewhat comparable.
update: Quick estimate: US per capita health spending in 2019 was $11,582 according to CDC. If the US health spending doubles life expectancy compared to having no health system, this is comparable to $20,000/healthy year.
This may be an overstatement. I think the moral minimum looks more like “bring children into the world in a way that’s consistent with the value system you plan to teach them and hope that they live by”.
If you want to teach a value system of global optimization, where every dollar should be spent to have the maximum possible impact to global quality of life, you’re probably adopting rather than conceiving anyways… but this great an investment into a single individual is likely inconsistent with those values.
If you want to teach a value system of local optimization, where every person ought to first do what’s best for themself and their loved ones before attempting to intervene in the lives of strangers, then it might be inconsistent to gamble with a family member’s lifetime wellbeing when you could instead have stacked the odds in their favor.
If you want to teach a value system of global optimization, where every dollar should be spent to have the maximum possible impact to global quality of life, you’re probably adopting rather than conceiving anyways… but this great an investment into a single individual is likely inconsistent with those values.
I think this is incorrect. Behaviors and talents are to a large degree heritable. If you want future people to share your values, one of the best ways to do that is to have kids who are disproportionately likely to share those values.
And while you can of course attempt to teach your kids your values, genetics plays a major role in determining what kinds of values we adopt.
This is one of the major reasons why “not having kids because of climate change” is not just ineffective but actively counterproductive; it ensures there are less people in the future that will be willing to make large sacrifices for the good of the whole.
I agree that many behaviors are heritable, but I model that inheritance as emerging from the intersection of genetic and environmental factors. I hadn’t previously considered generalizing from genetic behavioral proclivities to what values people hold.
genetics plays a major role in determining what kinds of values we adopt.
Could you point me toward the data from which you’ve drawn this conclusion? I imagine that there are enough adoptee studies in the world to point at a link pretty conclusively if one exists, but I’d also like to skip straight to the most applicable ones if you could recommend them.
Political attitudes seem to be about 30-70% heritable. Interestingly, people’s genetics seem to have a stronger effect on their attitudes the more politically engaged they are.
The improvements in the mental and physical well-being of the poorest of us if this huge sum of money was instead used to give them healthcare, safety from preventable, transmissible diseases (like malaria nets), clean water, healthy food, crucial supplements, reproductive rights, and most of all education, vastly, vastly outweighs raises the IQs of rich children by this little.
“Rich people” already give the lions share to anti malaria charities, just as virtually all of Earth’s economic surplus (for now, pre-AGI) comes from fairly-high-IQ people doing functionally prosocial things. The question is not “is standard EA behavior better than good embryo selection”—effective altruism exists because there are enough altruistic intelligent people around to be EAs—but how good existing methods are, and what runway we have to use them.
I think this is probably true at the moment given the current efficacy and the prices of IVF.
The only reason I hesitate is because I think the tendencies and aptitudes of people at the top have a gigantic impact on the rest of society and that improving those tendencies would have a very large impact on the world (especially if parents of children likely to end up in positions of power select for traits like kindness and pro-social tendencies).
But if you ignore that for a moment, then you’re of course correct that embryo selection can come nowhere close to the efficacy of distributing bed nets or supplementing iodine-deficient populations.
However, it’s going to take some time to bring down the price of embryo selection and future technologies for genetic improvement, so I think it’s probably good to start on that now.
Granted, this is all kind of ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room which is AI. For embryo selection to really matter, there needs to be time for these children to grow up. If we make ASI in the next 20 years, there’s probably not much point. I’m still hopeful that we can get a pause in place on AI development. But without one this whole endeavor has pretty low odds of achieving anything IMO.
“Moral imperatives” is not a category that relies upon financial means. Moral imperatives in traditional Kantian framework are supposed to be universal, no?
Just because some action could be personally and socially very beneficial doesn’t make it morally compulsory. The benefits would have to be weighed against opportunity cost, uncertainty, game theoretic considerations, and possible contrary moral systems being correct.
Also, please keep the hell out of the reproductive rights of other people. At the point where you prescribe this (and according to whose ideal standards, exactly?), I genuinely no longer understand the difference that is being claimed to outright eugenics. How long until it is de facto mandatory?
It’s probably morally imperative that all parents who have the financial means to do this do it.
I think it’s morally important that we make this choice increasingly accessible, and fight any bigotry against children born with this method and bigotry against their parents. It would take a pretty niche moral stance and cost benefit analysis to make this morally imperative.
I suspect bigotry against children born this way would not work, just because they would be impossible to identify. (Presumably most of them would not even know themselves).
Although a future world where someone says: “phwa! You are only smarter and hotter because of gross polygenic screening your parents cheated into you.” Reply: “But, I am a lonely child selected from 4 embryos, you have 4 less successful siblings, so you are more selected than I am.”
Yes, I might write later about how to make this cheaper. Though what I would write may have limited relevance, as I expect gene editing methods to surpass simple embryo selection within the next ten years.
I’m not quite sure I would agree with this yet, though I can see the case being made for it.
I think it mostly comes down to how much you think you can improve worldwide outcomes by increasing the abilities of those at the top vs bringing up those with the least.
Iodine supplementation in the developing world, for example, is probably the single most cost-effective way of increasing average IQ per capita worldwide. It also helps prevent other problems like hypothyroidism.
So if just increasing IQ per capita is your goal, polygenic embryo selection is not going to come anywhere close to iodine supplementation.
Of course, iodine supplementation is not going to give you any more geniuses, and geniuses per capita has an incredibly strong impact on human progress.
I really, really wish we could just ban AI improvements and focus on enhancing human intelligence and morality for a few decades. The reason I originally became interested in embryo selection was that I thought that genetic engineering might be a potential solution to the alignment problem (not to mention many of the other problems the human species faces). But it’s going to take at least 20 years to work (and realistically more like 30-40) to have a large impact. I’d put the odds of us getting to AGI before that at like 90%. The only path I can see now involves a worldwide ban on AI capabilities improvements.
Suppose a family values the positive effects that screening would have on their child at $30,000, but in their area, it would cost them $50,000. Them paying for it anyway would be like “donating” $20,000 towards the moral imperative that you propose. But would that really be the best counterfactual use of the money? E.g. donating it instead to the Against Malaria Foundation would save 4-5 lives in expectation.[1] Maybe it would be worth it at $10,000? $5,000?
Although, this doesn’t take into account the idea that an additional person doing polygenic screening would increase its acceptance in the public, incentivizing companies to innovate and drive the price down. So maybe the knock-on effects would make it worth it.
Okay, I’ve heard that this scale of donations to short-termist charities is actually a lot more complicated than that, but this is just an example.
I mostly agree with this perspective with regards to the “moral imperative”.
But apart from that, it seems to me that a good case can be made if we use personal health spending as a reference class.
Even if we only consider currently achievable DALY gains, it is quite notable that we have a method to gain several healthy life-years for a price of maybe $20,000/healthy year (and actually these gains should even be heritable themselves!).
I do not know the numbers for common health interventions, but this should already be somewhat comparable.
update: Quick estimate: US per capita health spending in 2019 was $11,582 according to CDC. If the US health spending doubles life expectancy compared to having no health system, this is comparable to $20,000/healthy year.
This may be an overstatement. I think the moral minimum looks more like “bring children into the world in a way that’s consistent with the value system you plan to teach them and hope that they live by”.
If you want to teach a value system of global optimization, where every dollar should be spent to have the maximum possible impact to global quality of life, you’re probably adopting rather than conceiving anyways… but this great an investment into a single individual is likely inconsistent with those values.
If you want to teach a value system of local optimization, where every person ought to first do what’s best for themself and their loved ones before attempting to intervene in the lives of strangers, then it might be inconsistent to gamble with a family member’s lifetime wellbeing when you could instead have stacked the odds in their favor.
I think this is incorrect. Behaviors and talents are to a large degree heritable. If you want future people to share your values, one of the best ways to do that is to have kids who are disproportionately likely to share those values.
And while you can of course attempt to teach your kids your values, genetics plays a major role in determining what kinds of values we adopt.
This is one of the major reasons why “not having kids because of climate change” is not just ineffective but actively counterproductive; it ensures there are less people in the future that will be willing to make large sacrifices for the good of the whole.
I agree that many behaviors are heritable, but I model that inheritance as emerging from the intersection of genetic and environmental factors. I hadn’t previously considered generalizing from genetic behavioral proclivities to what values people hold.
Could you point me toward the data from which you’ve drawn this conclusion? I imagine that there are enough adoptee studies in the world to point at a link pretty conclusively if one exists, but I’d also like to skip straight to the most applicable ones if you could recommend them.
Political attitudes seem to be about 30-70% heritable. Interestingly, people’s genetics seem to have a stronger effect on their attitudes the more politically engaged they are.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/opinion/politics-genetics-research.html
The improvements in the mental and physical well-being of the poorest of us if this huge sum of money was instead used to give them healthcare, safety from preventable, transmissible diseases (like malaria nets), clean water, healthy food, crucial supplements, reproductive rights, and most of all education, vastly, vastly outweighs raises the IQs of rich children by this little.
“Rich people” already give the lions share to anti malaria charities, just as virtually all of Earth’s economic surplus (for now, pre-AGI) comes from fairly-high-IQ people doing functionally prosocial things. The question is not “is standard EA behavior better than good embryo selection”—effective altruism exists because there are enough altruistic intelligent people around to be EAs—but how good existing methods are, and what runway we have to use them.
I think this is probably true at the moment given the current efficacy and the prices of IVF.
The only reason I hesitate is because I think the tendencies and aptitudes of people at the top have a gigantic impact on the rest of society and that improving those tendencies would have a very large impact on the world (especially if parents of children likely to end up in positions of power select for traits like kindness and pro-social tendencies).
But if you ignore that for a moment, then you’re of course correct that embryo selection can come nowhere close to the efficacy of distributing bed nets or supplementing iodine-deficient populations.
However, it’s going to take some time to bring down the price of embryo selection and future technologies for genetic improvement, so I think it’s probably good to start on that now.
Granted, this is all kind of ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room which is AI. For embryo selection to really matter, there needs to be time for these children to grow up. If we make ASI in the next 20 years, there’s probably not much point. I’m still hopeful that we can get a pause in place on AI development. But without one this whole endeavor has pretty low odds of achieving anything IMO.
“Moral imperatives” is not a category that relies upon financial means. Moral imperatives in traditional Kantian framework are supposed to be universal, no? Just because some action could be personally and socially very beneficial doesn’t make it morally compulsory. The benefits would have to be weighed against opportunity cost, uncertainty, game theoretic considerations, and possible contrary moral systems being correct.
Also, please keep the hell out of the reproductive rights of other people. At the point where you prescribe this (and according to whose ideal standards, exactly?), I genuinely no longer understand the difference that is being claimed to outright eugenics. How long until it is de facto mandatory?