21–30 of 106 posts
I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> now nobody would have genetic diseases. Nobody with parents who can afford IVF would have genetic diseases. Nobody would rise from an ignoble birth to greatness ever again... or at least not in countries without universal healthcare.
Doesn't that just mean that the bar for "greatness" will have risen? Isn't that a net gain?
I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
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.
I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
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 alte…
I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
> now nobody would have genetic diseases. Nobody with parents who can afford IVF would have genetic diseases. Nobody would rise from an ignoble birth to greatness ever again... or at least not in countries without universal healthcare.
I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 alte…
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.
I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
Blind or deaf people would probably feel pretty bad hearing "you don't want a blind or deaf kid".
I see a lot of comments underscoring the possible eugenics implication of this, but I am curious as to why everyone always paints it as a negative? Even in our very diversity-conscious institutions we can generally agree that some things are plain bad. You don't want a blind or deaf child. You don't want one with down syndrome or deformities that would just make their life difficult. I wonder if the high level of opp…
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 alte…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For IVF embryos, it's the small amount of genetic material which makes accurate sequencing difficult. For standard human whole genome sequencing (WGS), the fastest times are down to five hours[1] (although that is exceptional), for which the imaging was massively parallelized and it seems that the choke point was computational for that particular case (sequencing like this basically multiples the DNA, shreds all the…
Average WGS times for something a person can buy for a couple hundred dollars take a few weeks, I hadn't realize that we'd actually gotten the $1,000 genome. It was a big point of discussion 20 years ago, but seems to have arrived without the fanfare I would have expected. According to Wikipedia, it's been around for a few years, and claims the X-prize for it was canceled before that since it no longer looked like mu…
Someone spends $1k and gets back a DVD of data ~2017. Well, is that $1k just the cost of the reagents? What about storage/assembly/analysis? How many samples did you run in that batch? Are you including the amortized cost of the sequencer (what utilization, discount rate, and upfront cost)? Are these long reads or short reads? To what depth? (There being energetic advocates for low depth / few passes + imputation.) Is this list price or institutional bulk price? Did Illumina give you a special deal (everyone knows they have hefty margins)? Are you even allowed to talk about the cost by Illumina? And so on. If the genome were $100k, or $10k, these could be rounded off, but as the cost drops, these nuisance factors become ever more of the price.
There just was never a specific moment where you could write a headline "$1k Genome Arrives At Long Last!", and by the time you get Dante Labs doing consumer sales for $500 or whatever (as long as you don't mind waiting half a year for the results), it's a bit late to write any articles as it is no longer 'news', now is it? So, people just stopped talking about the $1k genome because it had arrived quietly in the night, and switched to the $0.1k genome. And then you get similar issues, like that '$100 genome' BGI announced the other year - yes, there's a '$100' number there, kinda sorta, but there are so many caveats and questions that it discourages anyone from saying 'the $100 whole genome is here at long last!'