throwawaytkgll

We are nowhere near any of the things you mention and a bunch of GWASes aren't going to change this.

Deriving social policy from popgen results is absolutely insane. Even putting aside the weak correlations, uncertain results and total ignorance of gene/environment interactions (it's not additive, it doesn't make sense to say a trait is x% genetic, especially a behavioral one), it would require having access to the genome of every single person you want to manage. It tantamounts to advocating a totalitarian hierarchical caste system.

And no, obviously laymen are not more likely to understand the implication, as evidenced by the "eugenics is good, actually" crowd in this thread.

The problem with "eugenics" isn't that it's morally wrong, it's that it's just wrong. He Jiankui screwed up royally and endangered the life of two girls without even giving them immunity to AIDS. If there was a safe way to do "eugenics" without detrimental and unintended effects such as causing cancer due to CRISPR side effects or disrupting hitherto unknown metabolic pathways, believe me we wouldn't have waited for China. In fact, in many countries rudimentary forms of "eugenics" already exist - e.g. you're allowed to abort your fetus if it is found to have an extra chromosome.

As for "intelligence" selecting for IQ points doesn't make sense. There's little reason to beleive g is anything but an artifact from factor analysis that's completely unsupported by any neurological data or known causal genetic mechanisms, and in fact a g-like measure can be proven to exist for any set of variables that positively correlate with each other regardless of existing causal links among them. The non-additive interactions with the environment are also just too high. Selecting for IQ would just result in random artificial genome drift (beyond the first obvious gains from developmental defects etc. but we sort of already do this).

I think there's a real disconnect between how HN techies think about genetics and biology and the actual state of the art - it's much less grandiose than they think. Science is generally boring.

It's one sided because one side is right and the other side is wrong. Studies showing "innate" differences (whatever "innate" means) are dismissed on methodolgy grounds because they do have methodology flaws. The overwhelming majority of population geneticists and evolutionary biologists dissmiss race science because it is flawed and has been repeatedly shown to be flawed since the 1920s. Techy people seem to trust the scientific consensus for plenty of issues, I don't see why suddenly an argument about "being fair to both sides" should be made just when it comes to the IQ of black people.

Wikipedia isn't as authoritative a source as you think it is, especially for subjects like this that are heavily gatekeeped by people with an ax to grin (without necessarily having the actual credentials to back it up)

And heritability doesn't mean what you think it does

I'm choosing to believe you're arguing in good faith, so prepare to ingest a decent amount of material if you want to understand why: http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html

You are erecting a strawman. When scientists express concern towards a misapplication of a result, such as eugenic policies that would derive from the identification of variants associated with whatever trait, they don't just think it is morally abhorrent, they also think it is wrong, misguided and fruitless. When He raised controversy with his CRISPR-engineered twins, it wasn't just because he bypassed all ethics standards, it was also because what he did was reckless and did not in fact protect the twins from all forms of HIV. When evoluyionary biologists express skepticism towards claims made by behavioral "geneticists" or "evolutionary" psychologists, they are in fact pointing out the shoddy assumptions and flawed methodology, independently of whether the conclusions are morally abhorrent or not (they often are, but it's orthogonal to the point).

As strange as it may sound, the entire scientific community is not in fact conspiring to hide inconvenient right-wing truths from the common people, and if they do happen to overwhelmingly lean left that does not entail the existence of such a shadowy cabal.