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China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

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Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#121

Post by logfromblammo »

jandrese wrote: post #53
HiroshiSan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is a high IQ enough to determine 'success'?

It's not sufficient, but arguably necessary. There are roughly three things that make you successful: 1. Being smart 2. Working hard 3. Opportunity Everybody can do #2, but most won't. #1 is at least partially genetic. #3 is mostly luck, but is influenced by the other two. In fact all of the factors influence one another to a degree. Being born in an area with good schools and working hard can overcome somewhat defic…

It's the same as the crime triangle of motive, method, and opportunity.

Opportunity counts the most. You can't win if you never get the chance to play.

Motive is next, as you can't succeed unless you have the will to do whatever is necessary. At some level, sufficient motive can generate additional opportunities, but there is an upper limit on how much you can supplement the genuine opportunities arising from pure chance.

Method is least important. There are often many ways to accomplish the same results, ranging from dead simple to prohibitively complex. If you have simple goals, you can still achieve them simplemindedly.

. . . And I think I now have a hypothesis about why so many rich folks seem like crooks.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#122

Post by gwern »

SilasX wrote: post #95
gwern wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

It is not realistic. Look at NASA - do they mindlessly go 'you must have X DNA' or do they do testing, like the women astronauts?

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

It's not, because you get literally the same consequence by not genetically testing sperm/eggs at all and simply screening by motility and donor health etc - people who don't do that have kids with more defects. And 'short of maximizing the potential' is exactly my point. A world with perfect genetic prediction and too-cheap-to-meter sequencing simply will not look like that. Some healthier kids are the least of the consequences of generations of society-wide embryo selection with perfect prediction and universal sequencing.

> Because they'd have automated it all?

Yes. Assuming it's still even an issue.

> 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".

A movie is nothing but what it depicts.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#123

Post by gwern »

blackbagboys wrote: post #107
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…

So it is safe to say the hype from people like Steve Hsu about BGI pioneering vast increases in human intelligence is mostly flash and no fire?

Well, it wasn't wrong, necessarily. A large project in 2013 to start uncovering the genetics of intelligence did in fact finally succeed and end the debate over the heritability of intelligence once and for all. It just wasn't BGI's project... Hsu has acknowledged that it didn't work out, but BGI's primarily organizational failure, and intelligence/genetics research since then IMO, doesn't undermine any of his broader claims as expressed in https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421 but supports them - intelligence is definitely highly heritable and reasonably close to the classic twin estimates, mostly genetically correlated with good things so boosting it will have mostly unintended good consequences, mostly additive so the extrapolations will work out at least several SDs, etc, all of which implies that very large boosts in intelligence are possible. And if BGI had been able to merely 10x its sample size, it really would have managed to find interesting things due to the enrichment & better phenotyping than SSGAC; but it was too small then (the approach works better, just not better enough). The main implication of the BGI failure is mostly that selection has a bit more potential than thought (more small variants to gradually increase), and editing will be a bit harder than thought (no big rare variants to edit one by one).

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#124

Post by magic_beans »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #59
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #41

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. The primary problem to solve is discrimination against non-engineered people. That problem was the only reason Gattaca was so dystopian. As long as there are controls in place that make it difficult, it should be possible to move forward with engineering humans in a pr…

> 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…

Agreed. Wouldn't it be MUCH easier to, say, invest heavily in our early and middle education systems?

Much cheaper than eugenics.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#125

Post by magic_beans »

HowardMei wrote: post #45
nsxwolf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it could mean millions of high IQ Chinese people doing menial jobs while suffering feelings of existential dread at a higher rate than their lower IQ peers.

Yep, since the booming of Conficius, generations of Chinese has been wasting their IQ and suffering from rationality-reality inconsistence. Increasing IQ without reforming the culture is just a mean to crush opponents in Chinese social darwin scheme.

I'm very interested by this. What is it about Chinese culture that is oppressive to people with high IQs?

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#128

Post by peoplewindow »

placeybordeaux wrote: post #102
superlopuh wrote: post #28

I'm relatively sure the Soviets had a go and got nowhere. I'm hoping this attempt will go about as far.

the Soviets were hampered in many ways. One of them was a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

And a fundamental misunderstanding of intelligence.

The USSR was run primarily by highly educated engineers. China has the same issue. Yet somehow the preference of large communist dictatorships for credentialed leaders does not correlate with actual success.

One problem is that 'intelligence' is a very tricky thing to define and isn't at all the same as IQ or academic achievement. The world is full of foolish academics. The first thing the nascent Soviet Union tried was putting a committee of academics in charge of setting every price in the USSR, over 21 million of them. The futility of this task was not apparent to any of the ideologically-soaked intellectuals that ran things until the economy collapsed, although I suspect many ordinary kulaks could spot the problem right away.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#129

Post by SilasX »

gwern wrote: post #122
SilasX wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wh…

It is not realistic. Look at NASA - do they mindlessly go 'you must have X DNA' or do they do testing, like the women astronauts? > Maybe that's short of maximizing the potential of the tech, but it seems like a genuine consequence. It's not, because you get literally the same consequence by not genetically testing sperm/eggs at all and simply screening by motility and donor health etc - people who don't do that have…

>It is not realistic. Look at NASA - do they mindlessly go 'you must have X DNA' or do they do testing, like the women astronauts?

They did further testing in the movie too! Note the treadmill tests that the protagonist was cheating on too.

But in terms of a general, big-org failure to properly use heuristics? Probably the most realistic part of the movie!

>A movie is nothing but what it depicts.

And some things have to be understood metaphorically because it would be too cumbersome to have to present the full picture and bring the viewer up to speed. That's just how the medium works.

For the story, it suffices that there exist people who do more tedious jobs because smarter people get the better ones. To show a more realistic scenario (janitor checking rooms on a tv screen and pushing buttons rather than mopping), for every dimension that changes, would take away precious minutes from the runtime for little narrative benefit.

Re: China Is Engineering Genius Babies (2013)

#130

Post by thinkcontext »

fvdessen wrote: post #105
thinkcontext wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" ... every Chinese family ..." This is overstated. Plain IVF today in the US costs tens of thousands of dollars. As a result in 2014 it was around 1.5% of births. Some insurance will cover IVF but is more expensive and there are generally caps. Its only accessible to the relatively well off and that's unlikely to change in the short and medium term. So even if development of embryo selection technology proceeds rapi…

If the expected benefits of the eugenic selection over the lifetime of the child are more than the cost of the medical procedure then we could expect bank/insurance/state to finance the operation.

Interesting idea. But it seems difficult in practice, mainly because it would be more than 20 years before there's any chance that the child could start paying the loan back. There are other issues, like, would it be fair to saddle an unborn child with debt who had no opportunity to choose?
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