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Comment by workaccount21 | Hacker News Reader

Because we have no idea how any of this works, selecting against one gene may have negative externalities that we don't even know how to measure. For example: a genetic cure for schizophrenia also dulling the creative traits it's correlated with. We cant even really understand how an emergent property like language works (see: every conlang), and you think we can engineer a civilization to be better by radically altering the balance of potential equality that we have been genetically optimized for?

A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension, considering the track record of intellectual movements and the proclivity of smart individuals, probably like yourself, to vastly overestimate the merits of rationality and concepts that can be limited to the mind of one human.

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>A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension, considering the track record of intellectual movements and the proclivity of smart individuals, probably like yourself, to vastly overestimate the merits of rationality and concepts that can be limited to the mind of one human.

The world is full of societies of 120 IQ individuals. That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers. That's 1 in 10 people. Even 145 is 1 in 1,000. This gene stuff could only begin to surpass what you'd be able to do by holding a conference in an academic field at... 170? 180? For the foreseeable future the kinds of selection that operate on full-grown adults will greatly surpass this other kind which is limited to four or five embryos.

In so many words, more than four or five former embryos are selected between in a typical round of SWE interviews.

>A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension

> That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers.

Is this an argument in support of the OP?

Anyway, much like with global warming, the issue isn't so much the averages, but the impact on the extremes. Now the world suddenly has 10x as many 140 people or 100x as many 160s, etc.

This cuts both ways too. A smart person isn't necessarily a nice person. A 20 point IQ increase could make the difference between someone who is a successful telephone scammer, and someone who brings down entire economies.

>>an insufferable hell beyond comprehension

>That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers

Well, quite... ;-)

Spend a week in a workplace with an average IQ of 80 and get back to me about which feels worse.

All of our culture deals with interactions between average people. People with significantly greater or less intelligence than average do not have a bank of ancient answers to ancient questions to draw on. One simple example of that would be norms against debt and lending - if you are very clever they don't apply to you, but that doesn't mean you don't need any norms. In fact someone who borrows and lends needs more guidelines and more complex guidelines if they're going to navigate business risks successfully.

The workplace that feels worse will be the one with an average IQ that is furthest from your IQ :)

Very true!:-)

>>> That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers.

Or jazz musicians.

A society of jazz musicians would look a lot more foreign to us than one of software engineers. ;)

Oddly enough since I'm both a programmer and a jazz musician, I've noticed some interesting parallels. In both cases the practitioners come from all walks of life, and many of them either bailed out of the mainstream education system, or had a negative experience with it. For this reason you have people with music degrees sharing the bandstand with those who learned by doing. I'm halfway between those camps, having taken classical music lessons through high school but learning jazz on my own.

> A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension, considering the track record of intellectual movements and the proclivity of smart individuals, probably like yourself, to vastly overestimate the merits of rationality and concepts that can be limited to the mind of one human.

Disregarding the personal attack (I am well aware of downsides, but it's called having a discussion), higher median IQ is not really the point, it's about giving the same chances to everyone.

We could use this to eradicate a wealth of issues that we do understand, there's no good reason to have babies born with Cystic Fibrosis, we know what genes are causing it.

>there's no good reason to have babies born with Cystic Fibrosis, we know what genes are causing it.

IVF is expensive and difficult and all easily identified genetic diseases are rare, so until one of those conditions changes (cost reduction and better techniques, or so many diseases being discovered that the odds that you will be saving your kid from one become significant), it will not be used for this purpose but rather as something extra to do when IVF is required for other reasons.

We agree on that part, I am not advocating for editing every foetus' genome in the next 10 years. I just think it's short-sighted to put a ban on that kind of research based on fear of inequalities.

(Use of the pronoun “you” as the impersonal)

You’re not curing cystic fibrosis, or any other genetic disease, are you? You’re just stopping disabled people from being born because you’ve decided their lives have no intrinsic value.

This can be said to a wide swath of people. Down syndrome people, bipolar people, blue people, people with physical deformities.

Why do you get to choose? Have you ever asked one of these people if they find their lives to be meaningless? How about their parents?

I can think of few hells more dull than a world of smart ass public radio listeners providing unrequested comments lathered in snark and cynicism.

That's like saying "You’re just stopping people from breaking their legs because you’ve decided lives of people with broken legs have no intrinsic value."

I would consider cystic fibrosis to be cured when there are no longer any carriers on the planet who could procreate and make another person who will suffer from that terrible affliction.

> Why do you get to choose? Have you ever asked one of these people if they find their lives to be meaningless? How about their parents?

My hope with this technology is that we can give prospective parents the kind of tools that allow them to make reproductive choices that best reflect their desires and hopes and dreams for their children. The question of course is what are they going to do with these tools? Will they eagerly use them or throw them away in disgust?

And then what do we do as a society in response to that?

Is it legal to feed your new born child alcohol? Is it legal for pregnant women to drink alcohol? Is it legal for two cystic fibrosis gene carriers to knowingly produce a child who will suffer from cystic fibrosis? Is it legal for someone to modify their embryo so that it turn into a child that will be a cystic fibrosis carrier? Is it legal for someone to modify their embryo so that it turn into a child that will suffer from cystic fibrosis?

Which of these things should be legal and which shouldn't? How do we enforce them?

> "Have you ever asked one of these people if they find their lives to be meaningless?"

I have a couple of disabilities and genetic diseases. They utterly, inarguably, and completely suck.

> Why do you get to choose

Presumably this "you" is the parent. They get to decide when (or if) they have kids and they can now decide what kind of kids they have. Just like folks can (and should) already screen for certain heritable disabilities.

> Have you ever asked one of these people if they find their lives to be meaningless?

They'll either be depressed or they won't feel this way. By definition, the ones that are well-functioning parts of society won't feel this way. I don't see why it should matter.

> I can think of few hells more dull than a world of smart ass public radio listeners providing unrequested comments lathered in snark and cynicism.

For someone who finds that dull, there is a lot of snark and cynicism in this comment. It's really not necessary, we're all here to engage with each others' view points.

“ Presumably this "you" is the parent. ”

No. I explicitly stated that I was using “you” as the impersonal pronoun, which English otherwise lacks (although “one” is often used instead)

That's a good argument for not engineering all children all at once - we don't understand the consequences. It seems like a good argument for starting to engineer a few children so we can start to learn what the consequences are. As engineering becomes more palatable to the general population we will better able to deliver good results.

Engineering children would likely introduce horrible diseases because as you say, nobody understands the consequences. What's being proposed is selection, the selection of embryos which have already proven themselves to be viable and passed several steps of Nature's disease filtration.

I'm using "engineering" in a sense that encompasses informed embryo selection. I don't think it's "likely" to have horrible results.

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