41–50 of 178 posts
Good! For too long, we've been hampered by the limitations of a human nature evolved millions of years ago for a very different environment. All previous attempts at changing human nature have failed. Activism does not work. Grand social movements do not work. Policing language does not work. We now have a chance to succeed in improving ourselves using tools that actually work.
The human body isn't a config file
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So what? How are we going to learn unless we experiment? I detest the precautionary principle. If we'd followed it in prehistory, we'd have never left the trees: who knows what might be down there?
It is fair that caution is needed - otherwise we're just a bunch of Qyburns, right?
ASOIF is fiction. We live in reality. The problem is far more often that we're held by obsolete and suffocating rules than that we're moving too fast. I'd rather try new things than hunker down in fear of the unknown.
Good! For too long, we've been hampered by the limitations of a human nature evolved millions of years ago for a very different environment. All previous attempts at changing human nature have failed. Activism does not work. Grand social movements do not work. Policing language does not work. We now have a chance to succeed in improving ourselves using tools that actually work.
What's the gene for racism you plan on editing? The human body isn't a config file
>and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism. If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will. I want genetic engineering because it's logical that as humans learn to exer…
Well, you'll have to wait for the genetics to catch up -- we know nearly nothing about the effects of variation on complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance. Even in known 'cancer genes' like BRCA1, we know what only a few of the thousands of single-base changes do. Without this information, things are going to be limited to known disease variants (a good thing)
This is changing at an astonishing rate, though. The development of GWAS combined with huge genetic datasets and associated IQ test information has opened the floodgates to finding more and more genes that predict the variation in IQ. Of course, it's still an open question whether these have other effects, and whether their effects are additive (linear), but the field does seem to be making extremely rapid progress...
'gwern has put together some links on genetic associations with IQ:
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I don't like it, but I have to admit you're most certainly correct that it's only a matter of time before human genetic-enhancement is commonplace. Best case, we'll be living in a Gattaca -esque world before the end of the century.
I don't see why that has to be best case. My best case scenario is that humankind has overcome tribal instincts, united around common causes, overcome arbitrary prejudices, and... well basically Star Trek.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you'll have to wait for the genetics to catch up -- we know nearly nothing about the effects of variation on complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance. Even in known 'cancer genes' like BRCA1, we know what only a few of the thousands of single-base changes do. Without this information, things are going to be limited to known disease variants (a good thing)
I'm pretty sure that if we threw a lot of genomes, healthy and defective, to a neural network, and then showed it a genome and told "make it healthy", it would. So it happens that genetics doesn't have to catch up - we can have this knowledge without knowing it. And also. People will question genetists' judgement. Some of the changes they're proposing have never passed statistically significant testing. But nobody ev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you'll have to wait for the genetics to catch up -- we know nearly nothing about the effects of variation on complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance. Even in known 'cancer genes' like BRCA1, we know what only a few of the thousands of single-base changes do. Without this information, things are going to be limited to known disease variants (a good thing)
So what? How are we going to learn unless we experiment? I detest the precautionary principle. If we'd followed it in prehistory, we'd have never left the trees: who knows what might be down there?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you'll have to wait for the genetics to catch up -- we know nearly nothing about the effects of variation on complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance. Even in known 'cancer genes' like BRCA1, we know what only a few of the thousands of single-base changes do. Without this information, things are going to be limited to known disease variants (a good thing)
I'm pretty sure that if we threw a lot of genomes, healthy and defective, to a neural network, and then showed it a genome and told "make it healthy", it would. So it happens that genetics doesn't have to catch up - we can have this knowledge without knowing it. And also. People will question genetists' judgement. Some of the changes they're proposing have never passed statistically significant testing. But nobody ev…
You're optimizing in a space of millions of discrete dimensions (one for each base pair), with little knowledge about independencies. This is in contrast to tasks like image recognition, where we can make use of the spacial structure of the pixels to build effective models like convnets.
Additionally, medical datasets, especially ones with genetic data, rarely contain more than a few hundred datapoints, which is not where you want to be for deep learning.
Machine learning is still useful in this area, especially to find genes or gene combinations with high correlation to certain diseases. But we are very far away from having a model that maps genome -> healthiness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is fair that caution is needed - otherwise we're just a bunch of Qyburns, right?
GRRM framed Qyburn negatively. You could view him from a positive angle instead: he's a brilliant scientist who left the scientific community so he could pursue groundbreaking research without being slowed by obsolete and conventional ideas. That's a heroic narrative, not a sinister one. ASOIF is fiction. We live in reality. The problem is far more often that we're held by obsolete and suffocating rules than that we'…
I think GRRM very carefully made by both the positive and negative parts key to the framing of Qyburn; he's quite clearly both a brilliant scientist who rebelled against obsolete and conventional ideas which did not work, and, a monster who is utterly indifferent (or so nearly so as makes no difference in practice) to the suffering inflicted on the pursuit of his research, either directly or in his efforts to maintain the support he needs to continue his work.
GRRM tends not to make unidimensionally good or evil characters in ASOIAF (there's a few that seem that way on the evil side, but they are mostly also ones we don't know as much about.)
>and is sure to renew ethical concerns that some might try to design babies with certain traits, like greater intelligence or athleticism. If America doesn't do it, China will, and in a generation will be swollen with a population so much more fit as to make the question of the US standing toe-to-toe laughable. If China doesn't, Russia will. I want genetic engineering because it's logical that as humans learn to exer…