Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 150 posts

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#91

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

dis-sys wrote: post #74
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Me. In general, the less intelligent people are, the less they contribute to society. I'd rather live in an engineered society with engineered people. If you are looking for bang for the buck in raising the average IQ across the whole population, then there are serious quick wins in eliminating things that drag it down. For instance, exposure to lead. And it's doable, hardly rocket science or genetic engineering. I…

why can't have both, "eliminating things that drag it down" + genetic engineering?

You can have the first if you have a government with sufficient sense and compassion, it's been that way for a long time - and to be fair a lot of issues have been reduced or eliminated over the decades. e.g. Leaded vehicle fuel is a thing of the past.

You can have the second at some time in the future if the research works out and you can afford it.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#92

Post by tormeh »

gwern wrote: post #49
tormeh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any long term (5-10 years) stock market conclusions we can draw from this? I would love for there to be an all-country ETF focused on genetic engineering, but I haven't found one.

Hard to say. Within 10 years there can't be any immediate consequences simply because even super-prodigy kids won't make any real contributions to anything before age 15 or so, but the financial markets can still price in future returns. On the other hand, scaling up is a huge challenge - even if 100% of East Asian parents wanted to do embryo selection and were willing to pay full price up front and plan reproduction…

>On the other hand, scaling up is a huge challenge - even if 100% of East Asian parents wanted to do embryo selection and were willing to pay full price up front and plan reproduction around it, it simply wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough fertility clinics or trained doctors

That's what I want to get in on. Whoever can offer genetical engineering to Chinese parents first is going to be the new Google.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#93

Post by HaloZero »

gwern wrote: post #29
smaili wrote: post #4

Here's the primary piece: > At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelli…

It's a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since so much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and major new findings are being uploaded to Biorxiv at an almost daily rate. I think the short version would be that the BGI project made a bad bet on a particular genetic architecture of intelligence (rare variants with large boosting effects) which would have impl…

Could you elaborate on what you mean by we've confirmed dysgenics? Does that mean humans now are actually more disabled than a century ago?

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#94

Post by nerpderp83 »

tormeh wrote: post #21
HiroshiSan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is a high IQ enough to determine 'success'?

No. The most important factors, in diminishing order, are: Grit, intelligence, beauty, education. But if you read the article, they're not really selecting for IQ itself, but academic success, so that covers all of the factors, just weighed.

Which include obedience if they are only measuring PhDs.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#95

Post by SilasX »

gwern wrote: post #83
cliffy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say its unrealistic? Eugenics has been seriously considered in the past, and is likely to be seriously considered in the future. If genetic modification and control becomes 'easy' and relatively safe I don't see why those in power wouldn't try to exercise control over that power. In that future its not hard to imagine lawmakers banning having children who would have inherited known genetic 'defects'. Now i…

Gattaca is unrealistic because (aside from being intended as mass-market entertainment rather than a scientific extrapolation) it is simultaneously too aggressive and too conservative: it envisions a world in which instant genome sequencing can be done effectively for free on a global scale (which, as cheap as genome sequencing has become, does not seem likely to ever happen unless non-chemical-based processes are de…

>while organizations use solely genetic information far beyond its predictive limits (set by heritability estimates, which are noticeably Organizations cargo-cultishly over-emphasizing certain ability signals? Seems pretty realistic to me! "How many golf balls can fit in a bus..."

>but puts this in a setting where there are no genuine consequences to any of this, no genetic engineering, no embryo selection, all of which should make the society unrecognizable.

What? A key plot point was that parents go through a doctor to have kids, who then picks the genetically-best kid that the parents are capable producing. Those who don't (and have "god-children" or "de-gene-erates") end up with sicker, stunted kids.

Maybe that's short of maximizing the potential of the tech, but it seems like a genuine consequence.

>it is ludicrous to imagine a world of genetically-engineered von Neumanns walking around and still needing human janitors, for example.

Because they'd have automated it all? There will always be the 1% least-intelligent, who will take the roles that can't be automated. Perhaps it's unrealistic that someone would be mopping the floor, but that's just to save the viewer from having to be told "oh, 'janitors' now just press buttons and visually inspect the work of machines".

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#96

Post by mmmrtl »

gwern wrote: post #39
le-mark wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're really plugged into this. Is there really a contingent out there that thinks Gattaca[1] is a desirable outcome? Edit; citing the movie as a widely known example of a stratified society with both engineered and non engineered humans. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

(Gattaca is a fictional movie, not a realistic outcome. What anyone thinks about it is irrelevant because it has not, will not, and could not happen, any more than Brave New World.) As far as making use of these techniques, certainly. Transhumanists, socialists, and 'liberal eugenicists' have always advocated 'seizing the means of reproduction', so to speak, but it's mostly been theoretical; modern behavioral genetic…

*IES being Iterated Embryo Selection - the concept of shortening generation times to months or less by producing gametes from selected embryos and crossing those until you have embryos with the genotypes you desire, so we could breed human strains on the same timescale as mice. An important caveat is that we wouldn't see the phenotypic outcomes (behavioural or physical) until we let a generation mature, so selection will be entirely on the basis of trusting the SNPs that large studies have implicated - who knows if all of these SNPs would function well in concert?

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#97

Post by yters »

HaloZero wrote: post #93
gwern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little difficult to summarize what has happened since, since so much has happened. This is a golden age of human genetics which has no precedent, and major new findings are being uploaded to Biorxiv at an almost daily rate. I think the short version would be that the BGI project made a bad bet on a particular genetic architecture of intelligence (rare variants with large boosting effects) which would have impl…

Could you elaborate on what you mean by we've confirmed dysgenics? Does that mean humans now are actually more disabled than a century ago?

Population genetics shows harmful mutations tend to accumulate much more than beneficial mutations, but not to a degree that reduces reproduction significantly. So the human genome is degenerating over time.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#98

Post by vilmosi »

IanDrake wrote: post #81
le-mark wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ladies who empty the trash here contribute more to society than I do. I just write throwaway apps for throwaway companies, they actually DO something.

But you can empty the trash and they can't build your apps. Also, when thinking about creating value, you need to think about scale. They change your trash and are limited by their physical ability and time. Let's say they saved you 4 minutes and changed 400 trashes, saving 399 other people 4 minutes. They've created ~24 hours of value. If your app helps people save 30 seconds a day and did that for 100k people, then…

Your argument can easily go the other way. What if your app wastes 30 seconds a day for 100k people? By, say, building addictive mobile games, or a social network dedicated to watching food pictures, or gambling websites, or, like the parent comment said, throwaway apps.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#99

Post by pcnonpc »

smaili wrote: post #4

Here's the primary piece: > At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelli…

To relate this to the news about CTE in American Football, I wonder how much American mental potential has been lost to CTE.

One thing for sure, very few East Asian and few Asian American parents who are aware of the news will allow their kids to play the sport. What about the reactions from other American parents?

"Symptoms of CTE, which occur in four stages, generally appear 8 to 10 years after an athlete experiences repetitive mild traumatic brain injury."

There were about 1,100,000 million high school players in 2014. This is approximately 7% of US high school students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#100

Post by yters »

794CD01 wrote: post #70
le-mark wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ladies who empty the trash here contribute more to society than I do. I just write throwaway apps for throwaway companies, they actually DO something.

You're free to quit your job and go empty peoples' trash if you really find it so much more meaningful.

His lack of nobility does not invalidate his argument. Arguably, many of the most despised jobs are most important. None of the elite would or could do them, and without society would fall apart. On the other hand, a very large percentage of elite jobs could be eliminated without ill effect.

Our role as the elite is to elevate and recognize their worth, and not sink them to our moral level.

Post reply on HN