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

The Breeder's Equation

edge.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 76 posts

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#51

Post by me_im_counting »

PKop wrote: post #32
notahacker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the regression to the mean issue discussed in the article, and the slight problem of attracting women aware that they have a very high IQ to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment. It's not like they're currently disproportionately likely to choose not to have kids because they can't afford them

>to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment Why is it assumed that this isn't a more attractive proposition compared the alternative. Certainly there would be many, if not most or all, that would be willing to make this choice. The point you are implying is that "career success and personal goals minus children" > "making smart babies and…

I’m a woman, and none of my smartest friends are interested in having more than 2 children. A few aren’t interested in having any. I’m the weirdo who wants 3, but I don’t see why I should be part of someone’s experiments when I can find a high quality mate on my own anyway.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#52

Post by gumby »

> Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial.

If you select for a single, measurable trait, perhaps. We do this all the time, with limited success, in breeding lab test animals, dog breeds and such.

But for survivability eugenics is hard: there are multiple dice rolls each cycle, not just the chromosomal mixing, but environment too, and that adds not just epigemetic change but different environments for which various traits might be temporarily valuable.

You can see this demonstrated by the inbreeding of the royal houses of Europe. They have recognized this too as they have been widening their gene pool for decades.

Even the magic island experiment described from which I extracted that sentence would suffer under that too.

Selective pressure is hard.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#53

Post by [deleted] »

beebeepka wrote: post #43
lmilcin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dangerous view IMO. Knowledge should not be suppressed just because some people might interpret it incorrectly. If you fear the problem is "complacency around issues around structural racism and equality in education" then why not address those problems head on rather than propose to not talk about heritable IQ? I mean both structural racism and equality in education aren't at all difficult problems. They are…

It's been a tough week but I fail to pinpoint what you disagree with

[deleted]

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#54

Post by bagels »

Causality1 wrote: post #18

Like most looming disasters, whether or not this is a real problem depends on quantifying the problem. Is this likely to significantly affect the population intelligence before we learn to engineer our children, say within the next 200 years?

I always find these statements interesting. Do you think many people 200 years ago based their actions on what effect they would have on those people 200 years hence?

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#55

Post by notahacker »

PKop wrote: post #32
notahacker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the regression to the mean issue discussed in the article, and the slight problem of attracting women aware that they have a very high IQ to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment. It's not like they're currently disproportionately likely to choose not to have kids because they can't afford them

>to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment Why is it assumed that this isn't a more attractive proposition compared the alternative. Certainly there would be many, if not most or all, that would be willing to make this choice. The point you are implying is that "career success and personal goals minus children" > "making smart babies and…

> Why is it assumed that this isn't a more attractive proposition compared the alternative. Certainly there would be many, if not most or all, that would be willing to make this choice.

I'm not sure why you're asking me this when your opening post in this exchange starts by noting low fertility amongst highly educated women. Smart women generally aren't short of offers from smart men to make babies with them (and the smart men are usually pretty wealthy). If "many, if not most or all" wanted to have lots and lots of kids instead of being academics or lawyers or rocket scientists, they'd already be doing it.

I don't think a creepy eugenics foundation that's obsessed with the IQ of their kids makes the proposition more attractive even if they're paying enough for a slightly bigger mansion and the husband to afford to retire too.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#56

Post by ImaCake »

mynameishere wrote: post #23
abeppu wrote: post #19

From a didactic perspective, I think he goes off the rails by immediately focusing on something as abstract and hard to measure as intelligence, and where there's a long history of people talking about whether it's even a single trait. In terms of just explaining the breeder's equation, I think he could have been more effective talking about, IDK, tall Dutch people. The other thing that's annoying here is that althou…

This kind of quibbling always comes up. He's just using professors and national merit finalists as examples. The truth is, you could probably take the top 10 percent highest-earning car salesmen (EDIT: and women), drop them on a desert island and, after two generations, get the highest-IQ society the world has ever known. But that's less obvious, so why use such an example?

But it’s not clear at all that intelligence is a single trait. It is incredibly messy and this means any analysis of it has to be very careful of confounders. In contrast, height is by many definitions a single trait, we know exactly what confounds it’s measurement (and those things are easy to measure!) and we have a pretty good estimate of it’s heritability.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#57

Post by ImaCake »

gumby wrote: post #52

> Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial. If you select for a single, measurable trait, perhaps. We do this all the time, with limited success, in breeding lab test animals, dog breeds and such. But for survivability eugenics is hard: there are multiple dice rolls each cycle, not just the chromosomal mixing, but environment too, and that adds not just epigemetic change but different environments for which variou…

> multiple dice rolls each cycle

This is an understatement, just considering SNPs, there is at least several hundred thousand statistically independent coin flips when two parents breed. It is difficult to overstate how powerful an evolutionary tool this is, and the implications it has for breeding.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#58

Post by ImaCake »

This is a pretty poor quality article. I say this as someone who works in a population genetics research group. If you like some actually thoughtful reading on genetics and eugenics I would point you towards gwern who, as far as I can tell, seems to at least get the science and math right.

https://www.gwern.net/tags/genetics

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#59

Post by Enginerrrd »

me_im_counting wrote: post #51
PKop wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment Why is it assumed that this isn't a more attractive proposition compared the alternative. Certainly there would be many, if not most or all, that would be willing to make this choice. The point you are implying is that "career success and personal goals minus children" > "making smart babies and…

I’m a woman, and none of my smartest friends are interested in having more than 2 children. A few aren’t interested in having any. I’m the weirdo who wants 3, but I don’t see why I should be part of someone’s experiments when I can find a high quality mate on my own anyway.

Yeah, it's interesting, humans already HAVE an incredibly complex sexual selection mechanism. There's all kinds of things that you are capable of selecting for without necessarily even realizing what you're doing. That selection pressure likely already includes the relevant things such a billionaire might care about, and many other things they can't even quantify, which likely includes genetic compatibility. The system we have has worked pretty well for a long time. It's hard to optimize such a complex and fuzzy thing.

Re: The Breeder's Equation

#60

Post by civilized »

me_im_counting wrote: post #51
PKop wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>to trade career success or other personal preferences for being the baby making machine for some billionaire's experiment Why is it assumed that this isn't a more attractive proposition compared the alternative. Certainly there would be many, if not most or all, that would be willing to make this choice. The point you are implying is that "career success and personal goals minus children" > "making smart babies and…

I’m a woman, and none of my smartest friends are interested in having more than 2 children. A few aren’t interested in having any. I’m the weirdo who wants 3, but I don’t see why I should be part of someone’s experiments when I can find a high quality mate on my own anyway.

So maybe the billionaire should enact his horrific eugenics experiment by creating a dating app to help women like you find high-quality men who want lots of kids.

He'd even make money, because... well, be honest, how much would you pay for that if it really worked?

Post reply on HN