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Comment by pcnonpc | Hacker News Reader

"Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

...."

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838

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Or it could mean millions of high IQ Chinese people doing menial jobs while suffering feelings of existential dread at a higher rate than their lower IQ peers.

Or they could build billions of robots with thousands of variations to make everyone live like a king.

And they will have high enough IQ to maintain and improve them as they wish. Without say IQ of 100 or more maintenance of advanced robots could be problematic.

Yep, since the booming of Conficius, generations of Chinese has been wasting their IQ and suffering from rationality-reality inconsistence.

Increasing IQ without reforming the culture is just a mean to crush opponents in Chinese social darwin scheme.

I'm very interested by this. What is it about Chinese culture that is oppressive to people with high IQs?

Turn any rational debate into a moral debate [good people vs. bad people] and appeal to authority/majority [to get the good people tag].

" ... every Chinese family ..."

This is overstated. Plain IVF today in the US costs tens of thousands of dollars. As a result in 2014 it was around 1.5% of births. Some insurance will cover IVF but is more expensive and there are generally caps. Its only accessible to the relatively well off and that's unlikely to change in the short and medium term.

So even if development of embryo selection technology proceeds rapidly it would only be available to the super rich for quite some time.

If the expected benefits of the eugenic selection over the lifetime of the child are more than the cost of the medical procedure then we could expect bank/insurance/state to finance the operation.

Interesting idea. But it seems difficult in practice, mainly because it would be more than 20 years before there's any chance that the child could start paying the loan back. There are other issues, like, would it be fair to saddle an unborn child with debt who had no opportunity to choose?

The flip side is most people smart/rich enough to get out of China, or get their family members out of China, usually do it

Essentially we would do what others do now in the west: Immigrate to China and do sucky work.

That math seems off. The gain should average 2.5-7.5 points surely?

Source? or calculation? The guy giving the figure is an evolutionary psychologist.

If the difference between "best case" and "worst case" ranges from 5--15, then that's the average best-worst difference. So the range is (x-2.5, x+2.5) to (x-7.5, x+7.5). Given it's a "lottery," the average person would expect x and could improve to x+2.5--x+7.5.

But I'm certainly not a psychologist.

Calculation: Kids differ by 5 to 15 IQ points on average. Assuming a symmetric distribution, that means that the smartest kid would be 2.5 to 7.5 IQ points smarter than the average kid, while the dumbest would be the same amount dumber than the average.

Actually, I'm not sure whether "5 to 15" isn't meant to describe the standard deviation, in which case screening lots of embryos might even produce much higher gains.

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