If you mean "how does it differ from the kind of eugenics where you murder people", the main difference is that you're not murdering people.
If you mean "how does it differ from the kind of eugenics where people screen for carrier status before they have kids together", the main difference is it's more effective and works for a broader number of conditions.
Maybe you've done this elsewhere (please point me to it if so!), but it would be helpful to justify the idea that embryos aren't people because if they are you're doing precisely that.
I agree with the argument that the couple choosing not to have a 4th child is not equivalent to murder, but I still think you're dodging the actual moral question of eugenics. With embryonic trait selection, the parents are actively making a choice that some kinds of life are not worth living e.g. Downs syndrome. Talking about this as "eliminating disease" is just not morally consistent with how we think about curing disease in living creatures, individuals are deciding those genes shouldn't exist. This is an act of commission by the parent(s).
I reflected on your post about ethical objections based on personhood, and want to offer some reactions. In order:
1. The alcoholic: This is an act of omission. Yes, there is an act of commission to avoid changing an embryo in a harmful way, but really she's choosing to not do something. It is a choice that a life with fetal alcohol syndrome is not as desirable as a life without fetal alcohol syndrome, which has bearing on the topic, but it's not quite the same because she's not already pregnant. A better scenario is if she was pregnant and a heavy drinker, and she has to choose to abort the child, quit drinking, then get pregnant again. Of course, if you think an embryo isn't a form of human life, it may be academic to you, but you may find differing responses to an act of omission vs the act of commission of choosing a life isn't worth living.
2. The intern: This is a delegated act of commission to select for a trait, and the delegate changes its mind based on new data. We’re not arguing about destiny here, we’re arguing about intent of the parents.
3. The parenting workshop: Honestly, this situation feels so manufactured, I don’t understand the relevance. Here, an act of commission (the workshop attendance) has some probabilistic effect on the children in the chaotic, nonlinear system that is life which you can’t control for at all. But polygenic screening is an act of commission with a probabilistic effect on the child born and a completely deterministic effect on the kinds of people not born.
My aunt has some kind of mental disability since birth, though she has led a fulfilling life through her family's efforts and her own. And now I can just choose that life doesn't deserve to exist, at least not as much as another one. That kind of power gives me pause, both for the moral implications and for what it does to the human genetic pool over time. There's probably some useful data about genetic populations that ritually killed children with undesirable traits (Sparta I think?) to understand more about the second-order effects, but I'm willing to grant the first-order effects are almost always greater than the second-order ones.
FWIW these questions are not academic to my family, we meet the criteria you outline, but still both feel deeply uncomfortable with making a decision like that. I am sympathetic that others that have experienced or witness terrible genetic afflictions may feel strongly the other way and simply not want to experience it again themselves, but I feel differently about accepting such tech at the limit and endorsing it as a mainstream technology that everyone should do for any reason they feel like.
I think it's pretty easy to route around your objections here. For example, suppose that it was discovered that a certain prenatal vitamin, let's say Vitamin C, decreased the risk of Down Syndrome (I think this is plausible; even though Down Syndrome is a genetic condition, it has to do with chromosomes failing to sort into sells normally, and some vitamin could improve the sorting process). Do you think it would be immoral for doctors to tell women trying to get pregnant to take Vitamin C?
(sorry, the next part is going to sound kind of anti-intellectual and ad hominem, but I think we're going to go in circles forever without it)
I worry you're going to come up with some set of complicated philosophical rules around probabilistic acts of omission or something that successfully rules in the Vitamin C scenario but rules out the polygenic selection scenario, and I will think those rules aren't interesting/relevant, and we'll be right back where we started. The reason I wouldn't ban mothers from taking Vitamin C isn't because it's *almost* an evil act but barely escapes because of something something probalistic acts of omission. It's because it's not even close to having anything wrong with it in any way.
I feel like it only starts to seem wrong if you're doing some kind of very vague zooming out and squinting, such that every act is judged by things that it vaguely rhymes with as seen through the lens of some kind of extreme and selective paranoia. For example, if I prepare to cut off my child's arm with an axe, and you say "No, don't do that!", then I say "OH, SO YOU'RE SAYING THAT ONE-ARMED PEOPLE ARE SCUM WHO DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE AND SHOULD ALL BE GENOCIDED?", I am doing some kind of weird paranoid drawing-implications-that-I-shouldn't act. We don't require any kind of complex philosophy to justify why I can suggest you not cut off your child's arm, it's a completely normal action that only seems related to evil things if you doing the zoom-out-squint-and-be-paranoid manuever.
I think it is better to not have a disease (including a genetic disease) than to have it (I try to justify that more at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nobody-can-make-you-feel-genetically ) I don't think this justifies hurting people with existing genetic diseases (because that would hurt a real, living person). But I do think it justifies creating people without genetic diseases rather than people with those diseases (since this isn't hurting any particular real person with a claim not to be hurt). In order to deny this, you need to create some kind of concept of potential-people's-rights which is going to imply all sorts of insane things later, then come up with new ad hoc shaky philosophical principles to whack-a-mole down each insane implication one by one.
My claim is that this comes from basically the same anti-playing-god place as opposition to vaccines, opposition to antibiotics, etc, that each step gets grandfathered in as it no longer seems like scary new technology and instead is just part of the scenery, and people invent new ad hoc philosophical distinctions each time to explain why last year's "playing God" is obviously okay and it would be horrendous to deny a dying person antibiotics, but this year's "playing God" is still bad. I think instead of doing that we should just abandon the "playing God" concept - at least if we're not religious and don't think there's an actual God who objects to this - and just try to make the world better, as best we can, while moving slowly and watching out for risks.
(an analogy for why I am not so concerned about risks in this case: suppose that we learned most existing disabilities are caused by some kind of radiation coming from the Earth's core. Then there was an earthquake, it disrupted the earth's core, and the level of radiation cut in half. Then only half as many children were born disabled as before. Would you support randomly mutilating / lobotomizing / irradiating babies until we returned to the current disability rate? Why not? It seems like either you must believe that, in expectation, the pre-earthquake level of disability is likely to be better, because there's some compelling reason why having fewer disabilities would be risky or disrupt society, or else you must believe the opposite. If the latter, you should support the random mutilations; if the former, you should support efforts to have fewer disabled children born now. I think almost nobody would support the mutilation in this scenario, and that's because they aren't drawing off some real belief that there are potential risks that outweigh benefits, they're just going off of the belief that all previous ways of playing God are fine but all new ways of playing God feel scary or like they're making aggressive ethical claims)
(here's another thought experiment - suppose that a genetic engineering technique is discovered that lets people "correct" cystic fibrosis after a child is born, but it costs $1 million. A child is dying of cystic fibrosis. Is it ethical to engineer out the cystic fibrosis gene to save the child? Definitely yes, right? Okay, now suppose you are a CF carrier planning to conceive a child. There is a 50-50 chance it has CF. You can either conceive randomly, have a kid with cystic fibrosis, and spend your entire life savings and go deep into debt in order to immediately engineer it out. Or you can do embryo selection for $3000. Either way, you're ending up with a child who doesn't have the gene for cystic fibrosis - you're just wasting an extra $997,000 the first way for no reason)
I am sure your aunt is a very nice person and you are glad she exists. I have a friend with an embryo-selected child. This child seems nice, as far as babies go, and I am also glad she exists. I'm not demanding you kill your aunt any more than you're demanding that I kill my friend's baby. If you accuse me of somehow by-implication thinking of your aunt as "life that doesn't deserve to exist", I will accuse you of somehow by-implication thinking of my friend's baby as "life that doesn't deserve to exist". I think better than that would be for neither of us to accuse the other of anything like that, both agree that existing people can continue to exist (both because they themselves want to exist and because they have many friends and relatives who love them) but keep potential people on the table as a group we can have ethical discussion about without thereby insulting any existing people, who are fine. I think you have to do that to argue about embryo selection at all, but I think once you've done that the argument is strong and we can optimize for things like giving people better lives.
(and it's not academic to me either - my own aunt died of cancer three years ago. I am against this and hope that my descendants don't have to go through this process. I think this is a real harm - in the sense that there will be a real person who dies, and real family members who mourn them - in a way that makes it stronger than the potential harm caused to potential people just because you selected another person before they existed).
First, I appreciate the detailed response. To cut to the chase, of course, I agree that we both agree that existing people can continue to agree. To be more expansive, nobody writes this much in public about these topics, endures the psychic damage of writing in public, then goes back for seconds in the comments because they don't care about people. If nothing else, I have no doubt how much you care, and we are arguing about what is the best way to help people. I also find the idea of complicated philosophical rules to judge each case exhausting and impractical. There are guidelines built on a set of assumptions, and if you're outside that set of assumptions, you have to use your best judgement.
As for keeping potential people on the table we can have ethical discussions about, I'd need to think about it more. The obvious case is homosexuality. If the straights decide no more gay kids, do gays have a right to be angry? Wouldn't your logic dictate they have no right to be angry, and it's on them to make more gay kids? If we get artificial wombs and the gay agenda decides to buy all their supply to flood the world with gays, do the straights have a right to be angry (sorry, this was just an amusing counterfactual to imagine)? Or do we get into a thousand cases of protected traits, lobbying, who gets to decide what to protect, etc.?
It is not my intention to accuse you of killing or judging people walking around, though you are clearly at least judging your own progeny's potential if you are using the service. I think that is the crux of the different perspectives here: you seem to look at the result and if it gives the result you want, the process is judged good, without judging intent, initial conditions, or actions taken. I am not a utilitarian, I lean virtue ethics so the details matter. This is a case of virtues conflicting, which is the main reason I do not like prescriptive morality for these situations because, again, the details matter and there is no substitute for critical thinking.
Consider this also a request for a post about the strength of your conviction in near-term AGI with selecting children for traits that may not show up well past that horizon. I presume it's good insurance if AGI doesn't show up/can't fix them in time?
As I understand it IVF already involves selecting the most-likely-to-implant embryos and discarding others, or using multiple embryos with the understanding that not all of them will implant. This was a relatively common argument in abortion debates.
You're correct this applies in general to ivf. Using multiple embryos seems fine - you're doing the best you can for them to live. Discarding the ones you don't want would not be moral if you view them as having moral standing.
If embryos and fetuses are people in a way that matters to God enough that it should matter to humans who believe in God, then God has a lot of explaining to do about why He randomly murders, at barest minimum, 10% of all people in utero.
And that murder rate isn't actually 10%, it's closer to 40 or 50%, given that most of the people God murders in utero, He murders in secret, without the uterus-haver ever knowing they were pregnant.
Oh, and God practices eugenics, too, as He statistically targets people with genetic abnormalities for this form of murder.
The only moral difference between spontaneous abortion and induced abortion (and embryo disposal) is nothing. We are acting in God's image when we use the tools He gave us to end pregnancies we deem nonviable.
The argument about abortion is about people's irrational religious faith, nothing more.
I never said anything about God. But by your logic since God kills millions of people of people every year by disease, so we are acting in his image if we create and use bioweapons to do the same.
I just left this on The Worst Argument in the World, but I'll put it here too:
"This is such a good post that it's worth perfecting. The Martin Luther King example is a bad one. I've never heard anyone use the argument, "But MLK was a criminal", meaning he had been in jail. On the other hand, frequently people say, "MLK was a plagiarist" or "MLK was a philanderer", and we'll be seeing more of "MLK laughed as he watched rapes". Those are a different fallacy, ad hominem, if the subject is, say, whether MLK was brave. We don't want to confuse that with the noncentral fallacy, which sounds a lot like it but is distinct. " https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
It is at least as eugenicist for the government to ban this. It is a declaration that it would be more optimal for some people to have Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis or lower IQ or whatever, when they otherwise wouldn't in a world where such therapies were available.
In fact, it is even more pernicious than the alternative, as it requires the state to restrict choice and bodily autonomy. In this sense, restrictions on gene therapy have more in common with the forced sterilizations associated with eugenics than anything else.
eugenics is incredibly obviously good if and only if in the specific form of “open free genehacking clinics on every street corner” where “free” means “it costs zero” and “anyone can enter there and ask for a genetic mod that their geneline will carry henceforth, selected on a catalog of every trait we know how to mod or do iterated embryo selection for”
inb4 “but not everybody would want to use them and then the people who haven’t been genehacked will be unfairly disadvantaged”: oh, so you want Fairness? ok, then sterilize everyone so that nobody will make kids without having thought at least once in their life about making kids or had an opportunity to choose which traits their kids will have
inb4 “but then it will become necessary to have certain genehacks to access certain things” yeah so? right now it is necessary to have certain partially-genetically-determined capabilities to do things, too; at least this scheme permits choosing
inb4 “but then there won’t be disabled people anymore”: Deaf people often want their kids to be Deaf. aspie people often want their kids to be aspie. there are even people who want kids with Down’s, and when i say EVERY TRAIT we know how to mod, I MEAN IT
inb4 “making fertility opt-in would enrage the trads who want people who fuck to be punished with kids they don’t want”: that is a feature, not a bug
inb4 “introducing a trivial inconvenience to fertility would prevent so much births that there wouldn’t be enough people to support the olds”: i’m counting on there being enough people who’d choose to mod for additional intelligence that they’d make fully automated luxury gay space communism happen
The argument against eugenics at the embryonic stage is that it reduces natural diversity due to groupthink about e.g. IQ, which is disadvantageous if it turns out that the narrower set of genetics you are producing has significant downsides or just isn't optimal compared to a wider set. Could be due to you not actually knowing downsides/optimality or due to unforseen changing of the environment. There are some conditions where it seems clear that there is no downside to eliminating them, and as long as the effect isn't significant at a population level (only the rich do it) then who cares, but when you are doing positive things like maxing out a life expectancy or IQ you do risk this sort of thing.
Here the argument of the piece was incredibly weak:
"When I think about these concerns, I consider the following thought experiment: suppose that I had a natural, unselected child, and that child became high school valedictorian and got into Harvard. Would my first reaction be “Oh no! This slightly raises her risk of anorexia!”?"
How about this, you gene select a child, they develop anorexia and drop out of school, would your first reaction be "awesome, that meant on expectation I made the best choice, just need more kids!!"
How is this different from environmental interventions?
That is, maybe teaching your kid to read is bad, since it decreases diversity, since otherwise there would be both literate and illiterate children, and maybe illiteracy is good in some way.
And also, if you taught your kid to read, and then they read a cult pamphlet and joined a cult and dropped out of school, would your first reaction be "awesome, teaching them to read was still a good idea in expectation!"
I think this is one of those cases where our common sense intuitions are good, and we use them for everything in near mode, and then we use a totally different set of crazy intuitions for things like new technology, where maybe all good things are bad and second-order effects dominate first-order ones. I think we should instead use our common-sense intuitions for the new technologies too.
In general why is modifying the genes of embryos different from environmental interventions? Inheritance to future generations and lack of the plasticity/changeability of the mind. A closer analogy would be environmental interventions on infants vs the elderly, higher standards of risk should be held for infants of course.
Yeah we should do good things, some of it is clearly good mainly because it is preventing obvious negative outcomes. The risk/reward for “IQ” modifications is less obvious to me and more likely to change with societal values and so on. You can take all the GMO monoculture ag arguments here as well.
Because we're going to have a fuckton of anorexics before we iron out the bugs for "gimme the higher IQ".
Beautiful theory, but nature does what it wants in practice, and in this case "in practice" means "a lot of experimental babies born so we can see where we're screwing up" but unlike lab rats, it's not (yet) permissible to euthanise the failed results.
The way it’s different from teaching your kid to read or filling the house with beautiful educational toys is that the benefits of these environmental goodies are not heritable. I don’t think selecting embryos for valued traits is ethically wrong, but I do wonder whether it might have unintended negative effects if it becomes common practice.
You know how you don’t like having visible upvotes in the comments? Well, I think selecting for traits is sort of like having visible upvotes.
Teaching kids to read and other educational interventions have had a profound effect that persists across generations and reshapes culture. Children taught to read will eventually teach their own children to read; better educated children tend to educate their own children as well. An educated population has a huge effect on society and could have unintended consequences.
I think you have a valid concern, but it doesn't come from a qualitative difference between embryo selection and other interventions. Rather it's about us having too much power to shape future generations. We would have the same worries if we invented some other way to radically change the personality or physiology (eg, some kind of incredibly effective 12 week training program). People would use this new training program to make their kids like most popular celebrity, reducing diversity in personality. Or maybe they'd use it to make their kids hardcore Republican/Democrat supporters. These kids would grow up and use the same intervention on their kids, perpetuating the change in society.
We want to have some power to affect the lives of our children. But too much power can be scary because it allows our mistakes to have permanent profound effects. New technologies are scary because they give us more power. It doesn't matter whether it's embryo selection or some almost magically effective training program; what matters is how powerful the technique is.
Yes, great point. To be perfectly honest, the thing I'm most concerned about when it comes to selecting for intelligence is that there is a certain kind of high intelligence that goes with being socially awkward, introverted, having trouble reading people and empathizing, inexpressiveness, fascination with patterns, etc. Of course many brilliant people do not have that autism lite thing going on, but what if the genes that get identified as high IQ genes are the ones that tend to produce the Aspergerish form of brilliance?
I am very very fond of quite a number of people of that kind, everybody from Oliver Sacks to many people here. I'm all for having more people who are that brilliant. At the same time, it doesn't seem like a plus for society to increase the number of people who are non-social, low-empathy, etc. It seems like more of what we *don't* need. We already have an ever-increasing portion of the "people" part of our lives filled with internet contact, fictional people in games, etc. and of course AI, which can already ape affection and admiration (though not very convincingly), and will soon learn to ape love and lust. How can it be good to increase the fraction of the population that is not terribly interested in other people?
Probably because of issues seen in animal breeding, where some genetic combinations that can get you to a desired phenotype are associated with genetic disorders, and the correlations wasn’t caught at first. For example, HYPP in Quarter Horses. https://www.tsln.com/news/hypp-and-the-impressive-line-of-american-quarter-horses-the-facts/ Essentially the disorder contributes to the desired phenotype.
“This constant flexing of the muscle cells is what leads to the pronounced muscle patterns on the afflicted horses, hence the popularity of the line in the stock horse breeds.”
“A suite of recent studies has reported positive genetic correlations between autism risk and measures of mental ability. These findings indicate that alleles for autism overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence, which appears paradoxical given that autism is characterized, overall, by below-average IQ. This paradox can be resolved under the hypothesis that autism etiology commonly involves enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence. This hypothesis is supported by convergent evidence showing that autism and high IQ share a diverse set of convergent correlates, including large brain size, fast brain growth, increased sensory and visual-spatial abilities, enhanced synaptic functions, increased attentional focus, high socioeconomic status, more deliberative decision-making, profession and occupational interests in engineering and physical sciences, and high levels of positive assortative mating. These findings help to provide an evolutionary basis to understanding autism risk as underlain in part by dysregulation of intelligence, a core human-specific adaptation. In turn, integration of studies on intelligence with studies of autism should provide novel insights into the neurological and genetic causes of high mental abilities, with important implications for cognitive enhancement, artificial intelligence, the relationship of autism with schizophrenia, and the treatment of both autism and intellectual disability.”
Conversely, selecting against autism could be selecting against certain kinds of intelligence. Ideally these cancel each other out if you do both kinds of selection, so we neither end up with way too autistic people, nor way too dumb people, and I do expect the technology to have way more upsides than downsides, but we should be careful.
The difference, very stark, is here you are manufacturing babies according to specifications. Treating human life as industrial product would lead to collapse of whatever "dignity of rational animal" that is left.
The specifications come from the combined individual decisions of a lot of separate humans trying to do something good. It is no different.
The animal breeders who care enough to actually evaluate the animals on these traits and pick the best, those people, they almost all genuinely care about the animals and want to breed them to be as good as possible. The people who do not care about their animals, puppy mills etc, also do not care about selecting their animals to have better traits and will just breed and sell as many as possible.
Take rabbits for example. Breeders of pet rabbits who want to improve the breed generally want to make them friendlier and cuter. And due to human perception, having a round face with a short nose is cuter. So breeders choose bunnies with round faces and short noses, and they are indeed very cute, but this is how Holland lops end up with tooth issues, because their mouths are not designed to fit into such a small space. Now, there is another combination of individual decisions breeders make - to compare their animals to those of other breeders in shows. Without this, the selection for shorter noses probably would not have gotten to such an extreme that it has a noticeable impact on health. Compare for instance Dutch rabbits, which do have shorter noses but not to such a ridiculous extreme.
With that background information out of the way, what do we make an analogy to? I would say the genetic testing companies are like the rabbit shows. Both have a very limited view of the situation - genetic testing companies can only see through the filter of a few genes with known effects, while judges at rabbit shows only spend a few minutes with each rabbit and do not get a chance to evaluate complex traits like personality or health. And both use that imperfect lens to decide which genes should be passed to the next generation.
(That being said, I'm still all in favor of selecting against gene variants with known highly negative effects. It's the positive selection that is easier to mess up, and even then, you can't do much harm within a single generation and by the time of the next one we'll have much better research.)
Gian, human dignity has gone out the window, only dumb old believers in the sky-fairy even hang on to that concept any more, and you don't want to be one of the dumb old sky-fairy believers, now do you? That would hold you back from all the fun things we all want to do!
This isn’t really a new technology concern. The issues being raised are as old as deliberate animal breeding. Selection sometimes pulls along things other than what you are intentionally selecting for.
Common sense intuitions from animal breeders would be that avoiding deleterious mutations is pretty safe, and positive selection of desired traits needs to consider the whole organism, not just individual measurements.
For example, some high IQ genes appear to also increase autism risk. In horses, selection for muscling resulted in inadvertent selection for HYPP, a genetic defect. Just looking at one trait can lead you astray.
The diversity discussed is GENETIC diversity, or range of options in the gene pool. Various versions of genes are called alleles. Literacy is not an allele. Alleles can provide immunity to a specific disease or provide other adaptive advantages.
You can see the genetic marks of old plagues in populations from the increased frequency of protective alleles to those diseases.
But this is not a real objection, unless you also object to the idea of people selecting their individual sexual partners. Characteristics like height, physical fitness, intelligence, lack of deformities, et al. are attractive precisely because they predict fitness in offspring. It's a cruder method, but we still practice it. Your logic would have us select sexual partners at random, just in case we were discounting some hidden yet important gene - though a gene pertaining especially to short, unfit, unintelligent people is unlikely to be particularly salubrious.
Choosing a partner allows for observation of the outcome rather than prediction. And after partner-choosing there is the randomness of inheritance that we are discussing.
But the big one is that we cannot all choose the same partner. If you proposed that every child was fathered by either the Super Bowl MVP or a Nobel laureate, I would also object that we are losing genetic diversity. The current system does indeed allow for many relatively short fat stupid people to procreate and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Are you saying that people's choice in partners is not based in selection? That they do not select for traits that predict selective advantage for their offspring? I'm afraid I cannot agree with this. You discount an entire field of evolutionary theory.
Inheritance may be somewhat at random, but in any case the difference in question is one of degree, not function. It is not *entirely* at random, because observations concerning genetics become more accurate at the general, not the specific, level. Once we are talking about the group level, genetic prediction can be extremely accurate. And at the individual level, one has only to go back a few generations to make fairly accurate predictions about a given person's traits. This is necessary in animal breeding, for example, and humans do not function differently on a biological level.
What inherent advantage do you believe random 'diversity' to possess? A proliferation of disadvantageous traits may be legal, even morally acceptable, and still have deleterious effects. Because we do not force people into relationships, humans naturally have a tendency to pair themselves with partners whose traits are the best they can manage to obtain. No one is actually choosing short, stupid, fat people as a primary option in our society because they understand genetically on some level that these are traits which are disadvantageous. The consequences of sexual selection have much more to do with the genetic makeup of population groups than random drift. This was well established by Fisher (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection).
Whatever process affects the genetic makeup of the population is "selection". It's a tautological concept. We are moving on the contiuum between "natural" selection where that process is mostly determined by "nature" meaning physical environmental factors and access to mates/survivability, through selection due to societal-psychological factors and associative mating based on "who do I think has the best traits", into a potential territory where genetics might be shaped by intellectual intent and design.
But yes, eugenics based not on embryo selection or gene-level mapping/modeling/prediction, but rather on intellectually intentional mating practices, espeically when applied at the population level, also seems bad. Of course that is the traditional way to do it and it's probably much more powerful at this point in the technology. It seems that most in this discussion want to run away from connecting this treatment with "breeding humans" so interesting that you embrace it. Producing the human equivalent of the English bulldog is exactly the fear.
All breading habits across all mammals are not random at all, they exist specifically to improving genetic outcomes. Just most people are bottom feeders so they get the best they can.
"making fertility opt-in would enrage the trads who want people who fuck to be punished with kids they don’t want”
Ah, *that's* what I want, and not because I think abortion is murder! Well, nice that you know what I believe better than I do, thanks for opening my eyes!
Maybe get down from your high horse and take a look in the mirror before talking to me from your false virtue. I may be using ugly words to insult you but only as a response to your attempt at defaming an entire group of people by deliberately simplifying a complex topic to misrepresent their intentions. You’re just another wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Blurring the intrinsic value of human life at the embryonic stage is a loophole to morally justify killing that person before their personhood is directly evident.
We're stuck with questions of morality, though, because this opens the door to the dream of social engineering.
We want the future generations to be the best. But what is the best? Well, that they'll have the qualities we value and the values we think correct.
But it's hard to forecast what the society of fifty to a hundred years hence could or will be like. If we had this tech in the 1950s, the qualities and values that were self-evidently correct would be "now there will be no more perversion, we can do away with homosexuality". Today, we have Pride parades.
What will be the Pride parades of 2075? What will be the optimum human for those days? We need to be a little more humble before deciding the future is blue-eyed blondes (that didn't go so well the last time it was tried) and engineering our children to fit.
Okay, so, one of the standard "proofs" from the pro-abortion side that the pro-life side's revealed preferences don't match their rhetoric is that pro-lifers rarely protest IVF (the ultimate topic at hand), even though it creates 5-10x as many aborted viable embryos as a single abortion.
I ask this out of genuine curiosity, because I assume you've at least thought about this, what is your personal opinion there?
Watch me smile like a shark as I pull my Roman Catholicism card out of my sleeve.
Got you covered right there, fam. We don't approve of IVF (and indeed, I caused personal pain to another former commenter on here, which I do regret, by expressing that in a previous debate about the topic).
I'm still curious about your opinions on the magnitude of it. Would you say it is as bad as 5 to 10 "regular" abortions, or is there some sort of mitigating discount rate?
Or is comparing the magnitude of sins at all a fool's errand? I don't recall seeing whether you've ever expressed an opinion on utilitarianism in general.
Edit: Also, is any of this affected by the previous pope's declaration that unborn children can go to heaven instead of limbo?
How long is a piece of string? Is one torture-rape-kill murder equivalent to five or to ten ordinary one-punch murders?
It's all bad.
Now, there is a distinction between venial and mortal sins, which is a whole discussion of theology on its own, but I'll just drop a quick quote from "The Screwtape Letters":
"You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts".
One possibility is that a small amount of a trait is good, but efforts to eliminate the bad, severe cases are bad. A little bipolar gets you artists, severe bipolar ruins lives.
A possibly hard case-- there's a gene which, when homozygous, gives immunity to AIDS. The piece of the immune system that AIDS hooks on to just isn't there. This means the person is a little less healthy in general. Worth it? Worth it going forward?
If I were expecting highly effective embryo selection to happen instantly (and I were young enough to live to see the effects), I'd worry about an "arms race" on traits like height (a race to the top? :-) ) which is, to an extent, zero-sum. As it is, I think too much else (AI, of course) will happen first.
The only acceptable answer to "But then there won't be disabled people anymore" is "Good." I can think of few better indictments of libertarianism than the idea that people should be able to choose to make their kids disabled on purpose.
That sounds uncharitable to me. If we have the technical ability to prevent certain traits that we might be considered disabilities, then *someone* has to decide which such traits (if any) are actually disabilities that should be prevented. I'm not sure that parents are always the right someones, but it's not obvious to me that government is the right someone, either.
That goes double if we can't be sure of side-effects — where we're not just preventing a putative disability but also imposing unknown and potentially unknowable risks. (E.g., maybe it'll turn out that knocking out a certain gene eliminates the risk of nearsightedness but doubles the risk of breast cancer.) *Someone* has to make that call.
I certainly agree with the "someone has to decide" issue being an issue, but some decisions are easier than others.
The government already steps in when parents reach the "now you're taking the piss" level of clearly not acting in their children's best interests, that's what child protection is for. I can't think of a more obvious case than wanting your child to be disabled. At the very least, parents should not be allowed to actively select for it.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a libertarian, and actually I don't think that the view you've attributed to libertarianism *is* exactly libertarian — in my experience libertarians tend to be more concerned with children's rights vis-à-vis parents than the reverse — but regardless, I'll try to convince you that this issue is harder than you think.)
The comment that you initially replied to gave two examples where putatively disabled parents might want their kids to have the same putative disability: Deaf people, and people on the lighter end of the autistic spectrum. Those are really good examples, so I'll stick to those.
The reason I say "putatively disabled" and "putative disability" is that Deaf people and autistic people often *don't* consider themselves to be disabled, or consider themselves to be "disabled" only insofar as the surrounding society chooses not to accommodate them. Many Deaf people choose not to get cochlear implants in part because they belong to Deaf culture, their Deafness is part of their identity, and they don't want to assimilate into non-Deaf culture. Likewise, many autistic people view autism as part of their personalities and identity, and they would regard with horror the notion of having their personalities — their very selves — changed by making them be allistic instead. (Imagine if someone offered to make you autistic. Partly you might be horrified because you consider autism to be a disability, but mostly I think you'd be horrified just because it would make you a different person.)
So the question is: should a government official be empowered to step in and say "That's cute and all, but no, the way you are is *bad* and a *problem*, and you can't have kids with the *problem* of being like you?"
If your answer to that is "yes, (s)he should be empowered to step in and say that", then: how about Black people? There are obvious advantages to having lighter skin (at least in most Western countries); I'm guessing that you don't consider Blackness to a "disability", but if a government official is tasked with preventing parents from having disabled kids, why shouldn't (s)he come in with a ream of data about poorer outcomes for darker-skinned people and say "I'm sorry, but objectively, darker skin is a disability"?
It's natural and commonplace for a privileged majority to assume that their own culture is objectively correct, and implicitly (or explicitly) disregard minority cultures as lacking value. There's no shortage of historical cases of majorities "rescuing" children from minority cultures seen as inferior (countless Native Americans and First Nations in the US and Canada, Aborigines in Australia, Christians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews in Turkestan, etc., etc., etc.). You feel that Deafness and Asperger are disabilities and should be eliminated — OK — but how certain are you, how confident? How much do you, *can* you, trust yourself in that judgment? How much can you trust your government in that judgment?
The disadvantages of being deaf are not socially constructed the way the major disadvantages of being black obviously are. If tomorrow each of us was transported alone to the middle of the jungle and had to try to survive, no social perception of deafness would have any effect on deaf people's inherent disadvantage in being unable to hear a predator behind them, or potential prey hiding from view. The only way deafness can ever stop being a disability is for us to somehow construct a utopian world where nobody ever experiences a negative outcome as a result of lacking a sense of hearing ever again.
There's a lot more room for nuance when it comes to things like autism, though low-functioning autism is pretty clearly disabling too. But if you can't agree that something as obviously disabling as deafness is in fact objectively a disability (or that there even is such a thing as objective disability), I fundamentally can't take you seriously.
(Incidentally, I was not referring only to people who identify as "libertarians", who tend to be free market extremists, but the general principle of libertarianism, which is to say highly prioritizing freedom of choice as a moral value. I was a bit inflammatory about it because I lean heavily towards prioritizing public health & safety so a lot of my disagreements with others come from being less libertarian than they are. I don't know if there's a better term for that with fewer strings attached; "liberal" certainly isn't it.)
That's not how words work. If it were, then "jaunty" and "gentle" would be synonyms (both from French "gentil"), as would "isolate" and "insulate", "diamond" and "adamant", "metal" and "mettle", etc., etc., etc.
Merriam-Webster defines it as "the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations' genetic composition" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics), which sounds about right to me.
Note that it specifies several elements not clear from the Greek roots, e.g. "human" (and not, say, selecting for meatier chickens) and "populations" (and not, say, an individual choosing not to have biological kids because they have a condition they don't want to risk passing on).
I'm not sure whether population-scale embryo selection would count as "selective breeding" for purposes of this definition, if every couple is allowed to procreate but not to choose which of their embryos is used. That technology wasn't available when the eugenics movement was in ascendance, so it didn't come up; we'll have to see if the term ends up including it. (Cf. "phone"; if you could explain all the different kinds of 2025 computer to someone living in 1940, I don't think they'd guess that any of them would be called "phones", let alone exactly which ones would and wouldn't.)
Apparently by your definition so is masturbation 2 days before trying to inceminate lol. I'm euginically eliminating the most aged sperm in favor of a fresher sample.
it doesn't involve the use of a cute blond chick. Eugenics is insisting in a sexy voice... I have goood genes!! And then the camara pans to her pants...
We're about to see some weird generational cycles.
Every generation one trait will get optimized to the point of oversaturation, and the next generation will find its comparative advantage by selecting for a different mix of traits.
If you mean "saturated" in the sense of up to the theoretical maximum, that means nobody ever gets cancer, heart disease, or obesity, and everyone's a genius. Why would you select for a different mix of traits than that next time?
If you mean "saturated" in the sense of up to some current level of technology, the current level of technology is changing much faster than the generational cycle. I expect genetic technologies to be much better than this within ten years.
Make it so everyone gets that 6 point IQ boost, and now the 100 IQ people are 106 IQ and the 120 IQ people are 126 IQ. That sounds great, but now we have to renorm all the tests so now the 106ers are the new 100 IQ.
It might be a better world. Or it might be just more of the same, where the rich and smart get richer and the rest of us pick up the crumbs.
IIUC, the extremely rich are not generally those with extremely high IQ. It's more the "moderately rich". The extremely rich are generally those who start off rich and focus on getting richer. They may have only an average IQ, but they hire people to do things that require such a characteristic.
I think that's pretty obviously an all-boats-lifted scenario. Sure, people's individual experience of whether society treats them as "smart" is just going to do the treadmill thing you're describing, and I certainly wouldn't expect it to particularly help inequality. But, pretty much every job on the planet would get performed just a little bit better here and there.
Yeah, but we're already performing "a little bit better" compared to previous generations and eras, and we're still complaining.
The smarter world will do a little bit better than us, but that will be the new normal, so now people will complain about how it takes a whole two minutes for their customer service problems to be solved.
Human social status remains and will remain a zero-sum game, so there will always be complaining, even if no one dies of hunger anymore and the average person is way better off than 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. It's laughable that some think genetic engineering will erase racial IQ gaps: families with a higher average will simply "keep their lead" by further increasing their progeny's IQ.
I'm not sure it's zero-sum. As societal complexity increases, so does the number of independent status ladders. The guy who's laughed at by his neighbors for living in his parents' basement at thirty, is maybe renowned for his on-line gaming prowess in other circles.
Not only would you be less likely to be dangerously stupid, you would get to reap the benefits of being in a society where people around you are dangerously stupid.
Intelligence is not a purely positional good. It wasn't a purely positional good last time we had this talk, either.
Hard lines on those of us who are already dangerously stupid! Should we be removed from society (and perhaps existence itself) for the sake of the less dangerously stupid?
I'm not a death penalty supporter, but I do support prison for violent criminals, and I support institutionalization for those committing crimes because they can't connect their actions to their consequences. That does amount to removing them from society.
I recall that Damon Knight once wrote a story where this happened. One character mentions that having beautiful children is like playing the stock market, you have to guess how beauty standards will change in the future.
Imagine if we'd had this technology in the 80s and 90s. It would be a net win for society because of increased intelligence and decreased mental illness. But you'd have to take a moment to pity all the poor white women whose parents selected them to have small butts!
I think facial beauty standards remain quite consistent throughout time. For female body, I grant you that there's shifting standards that might also vary geographically.
IIUC, that's already happened in China, where people selected for male offspring. (Perhaps that's happened elsewhere, too.) So far, however, the number who could afford the treatment has been a small enough proportion to avoid most of the bad effects.
I don't have super consistent income yet and I could probably pull together $27K for something really important but it wouldn't be, like, remotely easy. My parents mostly pay my medical expenses but my guess is the copays are probably something on the order of $1000 per year, and the vast majority of that is continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps (which aren't strictly necessary), the insulin itself is like $10 for a 90 day supply I think? No idea what the insurance is company is paying.
Okay, that makes sense. In the post, I said the claim required that "you’re well-off enough that these aren’t impossible sums of money for you", and I was referring to people with Type 2 who tend to be in their 40s and 50s and so probably richer than you. I'll edit "impossible" to "extraordinary".
Strongly agree. I have Type 1 as well, but am in my 40’s and fairly well off. I’d pay >>$100k to get rid of it. Not pay excruciating attention to how much I’m eating would be amazing.
FWIW, I'm type 2 diabetic, but I control it by diet so officially I'm "not currently diabetic" (which is because of a silly definition, not because of remission).
I might pay $5,000 for a complete cure. (If you'd asked me a decade ago, I would probably have been willing to pay more. If you'd asked me in the first year after diagnosis, I'd probably have agreed to the $27,000.)
I think that's fair. If you had gotten the cure for $27k as soon as you were diagnosed you would have saved yourself a huge amount of effort, time, and cost learning and working to manage the condition. Now, you would benefit from the instant cure but you'd never get that time and effort back.
The good news is that I don’t think your 50k number is correct anymore from Herasight. They might reach out and correct you, and we might see just how quickly capitalism brings down costs for technologies like this
I asked Herasight the day before yesterday. They said it was still their most recent number, but that they hope to get it lower in the near future, and that people with unusual situations could ask them for a custom quote that might be less.
Oh, I should probably tell you something: type 1 diabetes is one of the most tractable conditions with gene editing. We can lower the risk by >50% with a few edits. It's actually quite unusual in this way. Conditions like schizophrenia or ADHD involve far more genes with much smaller effects.
Not so with type 1.
And because type 1 has such an earlier age of onset compared with other "highly editable" conditions like Alzheimer's or breast cancer, it's a strong candidate to be one of the first conditions we edit for. We'll be able to demonstrate within ~5 years or so that it actually works.
I think early editing tech is probably going to be roughly on par with the cost of the more expensive embryo selection companies (possibly a bit cheaper), so it's possible cost will still be an issue.
But it's worth noting you can at least lower the cost of egg retrieval by doing it abroad. You can do egg retrieval in the Czech Republic for $3000-$4000, in Spain for $6000, and in Vietnam for $2000. And while I can't really vouch for the quality of specific clinics, the expected cost per child is almost certainly lower than for US clinics.
If you're interested in talking about embryo editing for type one, drop me an email at genesmithlesswrong@gmail.com
Scott, you say: "rich people get first crack at every new technology, but poor people usually follow close behind... Also, it would be crazy for any forward-thinking government not to cover this."
That's reassuring for the classic concern that this tech could, over generations, create genetically-stratified socioeconomic classes *within* a country.
But across countries, still seems like things are gonna get really weird, like "ok now there are *actually* significant genetic differences in IQ across countries". Seems like an important downside.
You would only be one generation "behind" the rest of your country if you had an unselected pregnancy. Probably a wash if we're looking at the impact over multiple generations.
I'm actually a bit more optimistic because there are so many interventions left in developing countries that could raise IQ significantly more cost-effectively than embryo selection. The $/IQ point cost effectiveness for LEAP is orders of magnitude more than that of embryo selection. So I would actually expect to see the gap close in coming years, even if embryo selection is widely adopted.
In the long run, my hope is developing countries can just get a lot richer, and IVF + embryo selection can get cheaper. At some point those two lines will cross. Our job is to increase the slope of both curves.
Unlike wealthy countries, where correlation between fertility and IQ is zero or weak-negative, it's very negative in many poor countries and their brightest are likely to emigrate to rich countries; as environmental gap shrinks, genetic grows...
I am mostly of the opinion that a scenario where country A has IQ 100 and country B has IQ 120 is worse than a scenario where they're both 120 but better than a scenario where they're both 100. I think equality is nice, but not so nice that you should burn down all the houses to give everyone equally good tents.
I do have some concerns that relative advantages can be exploited to get away with evil crap, but we already have some pretty big relative advantages along other axes and the results have not so far convinced me that it's worthwhile to outright destroy value just for more equality, except in some special cases like literal weapons (e.g. treaties that put limits on how many nukes each country can have).
I think there's a somewhat wider range of scenarios where it's good to _redistribute_ some of the value (e.g. progressive tax), compared to destroying it. So hypothetically maybe it would be good if there were a global policy of higher-IQ countries paying some aid to lower-IQ countries.
("But they'd never agree to that!" "Oh, but you think they'd agree to voluntarily lowering their IQs instead?")
Well, it seems there are already genetically stratified socioeconomic classes in many countries. India is undeniably one example, with many Middle Eastern countries being pretty slam dunk too. Even in America, Charles Murray and others like Raj Chetty make the case that there has been cognitive stratification correlating with income for at least a century. China seems more even than most high-achieving countries in this regard.
You underestimate our ability to stick our heads in the sand about IQ differences. Those who wish to do that will do it just the same as they do today.
All I can say is if I was inclined to do this sort of thing and I already had kids I'd be asking the company to test the existing kids too to calibrate how seriously to take the predictions.
First, your kids probably don't have prostate cancer yet. And child IQ is pretty weakly correlated with adult IQ, and the predictors are for the latter.
Second, it's hard to get good intuitions for statistics, but I think even a somewhat valuable predictor can have a high error rate. If I'm reading the widget on Herasight's site correctly, if you have five embryos and use their IQ predictor with supposed +6 IQ point gains, there's still only a 73% chance that your child born using their predictor will be smarter than an average child born without it. So if you "test" their product and find that actually your unselected kid is smarter than your selected kid, this doesn't prove very much in a scientific sense - it's the chance of two coin flips both landing heads.
Maybe a better tactic would be for them to test you, the adult (since you might have gotten some diseases, and you know your adult IQ). Then you only have the latter problem (sample size of one). So you should get them to test lots of different adults. But then you're back at "this works in large studies", which is how they validated them in the first place!
I've had Nucleus and Herasight genetically test me. There wasn't very much useful on there. For example, I have obsessive compulsive disorder. Nucleus said that I had slightly-higher-than-average genetic risk of OCD, which put me at 2.6% compared to the overall population's 2.3%. Is this good (because it identified higher-than-average risk)? Is it bad (because it gave me only 2.6% chance of a condition which I, in fact, have)? I'm not sure, and I think the real answer is to not pretend that you can conclude much from a single data point in a heavily probabilistic domain.
Herasight did also test my two existing children, but I found I couldn't bear to look at the results. We agreed that my wife would look at the results and agreed to let me know if there was anything actionable. But AFAIK they used the information internally to get a better picture of my and my wife's DNA to predict our future children, but forgot to send it to us. I plan to remind them about it when I get around to it.
This whole thing really smells of “amulet to defend against leopards” - there are no leopards, so clearly it works!
It’s functionally impossible for me to confirm the service achieves what it says it does, and even in the best possible world the effects are so tiny I am unlikely to see them; and when I don’t, well, what did I expect? - the dice don’t often roll all sixes, guess I just got unlucky, LOL cha-ching.
Meanwhile, their margins will be even better if instead of doing any work they just hook an RNG up to the numbers in their report - you can’t even start to check the statistics for a couple of decades, while the half life of a startup is measured in single digit years! - and even if you literally go to their lab and look over their shoulder, since in the long run Moloch says everything that can be enshittified will be enshittified, the fact they had not yet done this when you checked has only a limited bearing on how much I can trust them by the time I get around to using the service. Net result: a generation of Silicon Valley neophiles using their cellphones to call the local shaman to help pick embryos.
Imagine, ten years from now, there are lots of these startups and also just as many of the sort that just make up numbers, and everything in between. How do you tell which one to go with, or where on that spectrum any particular one lies, given only their marketing material?
The situation feels somewhere between buying a lottery ticket and one of those deeds for land on the moon: there is some tiny chance it might pay off, but realistically, you’ve probably spent your money on a worthless bit of paper.
This sounds like the perfect opportunity for scammers. After all, how do you prove a negative? "Your child hasn't got prostate cancer yet". Yeah, and by the time they're in the age bracket to get it, they either do get it or they don't.
If they don't, the scammer company (which did not, in fact, select out embryos) can say "Told you it works". If they do, well, that's forty-plus years in the future. The company may not still exist. Or they can pull statistical fine print out of the air to say "Ah, we never said they'd *never* get prostate cancer, we just said this would reduce the risk. Not our fault some risk remained and they got unlucky!"
You make my stony black heart want to set up a dodgy clinic promising the gullible and desperate that I'll give them superbabies, when it's bog-standard IVF, I pocket the dough and flee to Switzerland, and it's their problem if the kids get health difficulties etc. in later life.
That's a real problem. It's a real technology, that really ought to work if done properly, but it's a lot easier to lie, and it may take multiple decades for your lies to be proven. And when the lie *is* proven, most of the evidence for "who was responsible" will be gone, so the court case may be impossible. (Or, by then, the scammer may be dead of old age.)
...where by "work" we mean if everything goes /perfectly/ we see a single digit percentage effect in statistics across the entire population measured several decades later, rather than anything specific in particular that any person actually paying for the service could point to.
Don't even need deliberate lying, as of yet there's a lot of room for "oops, didn't work out as we thought it would, genuine error, well them's the breaks, that's the way the cookie crumbles, hey at least your baby has the right number of eyes and hands, okay?"
The "oops!" is a different problem. Yeah, it's a real one, but it's a different one. (Well, except that with over-promising they blend into each other around the edges.)
Whether they select or not, very ease to prove, because they have to give customers these genomes data and after child is born you can check if child's genome matches the selected one.
And what are you gonna do if the baby doesn't match up? "Excuse me, I wish to return this deficient item, here's the receipt"?
Sure, this is what American law courts are for, but good luck arguing statistical probability there against company lawyers who are pleading "you shoulda read the fine print, there's no guarantees in biology".
“ Herasight did also test my two existing children, but I found I couldn't bear to look at the results.”
It would be worthwhile exploring why this is so.
(Just using 2.6% chance as a generic chance and anorexia as a generic condition) Is it because
- if you found out a child had a 2.6% chance of anorexia, you regret not having had the chance to lower it to 2.3%
- if you found out an existing child had a 2.6% chance of anorexia, it will have been in some sense unfair on them that your third child has a lower chance
- you will regret knowing that your existing child has a 2.6% chance of anorexia versus 2.3% chance on average and having to deal with the consequences of anorexia in the future
- you will regret knowing one existing child has a 2.6% chance of getting anorexia and the other has only a 2.3% chance and that will influence how you treat your two children
I can definitely imagine ‘not being able to look’ but not having kids myself I’m not sure why it is.
"Herasight did also test my two existing children, but I found I couldn't bear to look at the results."
Presumptuous of me to say this, but I am very glad you didn't. You acted like a father, not someone purchasing from a breeder who wants to check the pups are indeed the pedigree claimed.
Super interesting developments, somehow, after a slow start, the 21st century does pick up steam after all.
But with regard to
> To have a sense of why society works the way it does, instead of feeling like you’re being blown back and forth by institutions you don’t really understand?
Would not institutions become more complex at the same rate that general intelligence increases?
Good question. I don't know. Do countries with very high IQ (like China) have noticeably more complicated institutions than those with very low IQ? I'm not sure (and insofar as they do, I'm not sure if it has more to do with IQ or wealth or stability). See also my recent https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about-aborigines post for some discussion of whether "primitive" cultures have more or less complex institutions.
Well, the Pirahã of the Amazon don't have words for numbers, and they have no abstract terms for colors (they'd describe something red as "like blood"). Yet they seem to have words for every plant and animal species in their environment with the uses and dangers of each (if any). Considering the biodiversity of the Amazonian rain forest, that's quite an accomplishment. Probably they'd have trouble with Raven's Progressive Matrices test because they don't really have words for shapes, and they're not trained to recognize the abstractions (in fact, John C. Raven recommended that his test wouldn't be suitable for populations without formal systems of schooling—can't find the quote now, though).
No. But they're foragers, and like any good naturalist, they can recognize all the plants and animals they encounter in their environment. Upon further digging, their designations seem to be general descriptions—e.g., "the plant whose bark gives visions." This is similar to the Inuit "words" for snow, which are really agglutinative descriptions, e.g., "snow that is slushy and granular".
Identifying all the plants in our environment without the help of a phone app is more than most of us can do. "Oh, that's some sort of tree. I think it's an oak."
They have nothing else to do in jungle. There are their relatives (South America is very undiverse genetically) receiving education and they get much lower than 100. In USA, Blacks have nothing which could tie them to preindustrial societies, but score lower. And Inuit are above US Blacks or Native Americans.
US rural whites score better than US urban blacks on IQ tests, and know much more animals and plants, does it make rural whites smarter than urban blacks?
I think you have to have a high IQ to be able to learn to read and write in a system with no alphabet and thousands of possible grammatically valid characters.
Don’t assume it, come and look! The answer is: lots of very average and dumb Chinese people are literate, so no, intelligence is not required for literacy in a non-alphabetic system.
You definitely need more than 600 characters to be functionally literate. There’s a misleading figure that says 600 gets you to 80% recognition, but this is at the character level. If you didn’t recognize 1 out of 5 English words on a page you’d have trouble understanding many sentences and paragraphs, even with guessing from context. I visited China while I only knew 600 or so characters and was definitely not “functionally literate.” I didn’t really start to feel able to read the language in a fluent, useful way till I hit 1500-2000 characters. In Japan they get away with fewer characters because they supplement with kana (syllabaries) and kanji are a bit more overloaded than hanzi.
For what it's worth, it might be true that China has more complicated institutions than the West. When my family member emigrated from China, they were enormously relieved at the amount of bribery and favor-trading they no longer had to do to acquire basic goods and services
I suppose one could argue that the complexity of human institutions has been correlated with the general rise in IQ in all regions of the world over the past century. But I think a better explanation is that the World's GDP has multiplied 4.5x in the past 50 years. More types of gizmos are being manufactured. More companies to make the gizmos. More paperwork (now electronic) to track the gizmo logistics etc. Plus, companies have gone multinational, which requires more workers and whole new systems to deal with dozens of regulatory regimes, etc.
I joined Cisco in 1998. I was at the bottom of the organizational tree, but there were only four levels of management between me and the CEO (John Chambers). When I left Cisco in 2002, there were ten levels between me and John Chambers. The organization had burgeoned with our product space. New systems were implemented to deal with the new complexity of the organization. This definitely had nothing to do with changes in IQ and the timeline was too short to have been affected by the Flynn Effect.
Generational intelligence has been increasing by ~3 pts per decade in the US. Our institutions are definitely more complex than they were when IQ started being measured a century ago. But probably that increase can't be attributed to increased IQ. I doubt if US citizens are any smarter than they were a century ago.
That ~3 has little sense because it depends on which IQ test is used; Raven's matrices show larger improvement while arithmetic is barely up. It's also that were no large-scale studies of modern people on 100 year old tests; it's extrapolation.
Then why do they keep renormalizing them every 10 to 20 years?
But your statement is incorrect. the Flynn Effect has affected all the major IQ tests. However it seems to have plateaued in the US and Scandinavian countries in 00s and 10s.
It affected all tests, but to a wildly different degrees, the 1st picture on wikipedia page about it makes it obvious.
If population improved 10 points on test A, then improved 10 points on test B, then improved 10 points on test C, it doesn't mean it improved 30 points on test A.
Flynn compared the raw scores (not normalized IQs) of people tested in different eras but taking the *same* version of the test. Someone taking the 1950 version in 1980 would score significantly higher than the 1950 average because the test hadn't been renormed. Flynn did not claim that people were getting smarter. And as you can see from the chart you referenced, the average increase in all 5 performance subsets (across various IQ tests) was ~3 pts per decade, which also closely matches the upward trend in FSIQ. RPM is the only actual IQ test mentioned on that chart (and ironically, it improved the most, even though it's supposedly the least culturally and educationally biased measure of intelligence).
And I very much doubt that people are getting smarter, even though raw "intelligence" (whatever the f**k that is) is improving.
Does it make any sense to very different values in range from 0 to 6 to 3? They are not just random tries of same experiment, they are different scales.
>And I very much doubt that people are getting smarter, even though raw "intelligence" (whatever the f**k that is) is improving.
in terms of IQ-ists: the improvements are not on 'g'.
As one would expect looking at IQ and fertility correlation.
But in the US, the Flynn effect seems to have not only plateaued in the 00s, but was trending downward in the 10s. Not sure if this trend is continuing in the 20s.
They might do. But (1) if you magically (or technologically) make your children a bit cleverer then the effect on their ability to navigate institutional complexity is much larger than the effect on actual institutional complexity, and (2) if it's true that societies of smarter people have more complex institutions, that's probably because they're getting benefits from those more complex institutions sufficient to justify their complexity.
"Also, it would be crazy for any forward-thinking government not to cover this; it could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in future health care expenses. In countries with public health care, this comes directly out of the government treasury; even in the US, it’s covered by Medicare after age 65. The government should be begging people to select embryos."
A good test case for how this could roll out is genetic screening for stuff like cystic fibrosis, where there's a well understood genetic cause and it can be screened in infants (1).
From a very quick review, Medicare does not cover genetic screening for embryos where there's a family history of cystic fibrosis.
It looks like private insurance does cover screening but...only for patients with fertility problems. I'm not sure I understand this policy:
Is your figure for type 2 diabetes specifically for the US? A quick google suggests that around 29% of people in the US over age 65 have (diagnosed or undiagnosed) type II diabetes, but around 16% in the EU, with fairly large differences between countries. Admittedly all these numbers are higher than I would have guessed.
One can imagine a dystopian future where McDonalds offers free gene editing to improve their future market share...
One can imagine a dystopian future where McDonalds offers free gene editing specifically towards genes that promote high metabolism and strong nutritional extraction. There are people that eat tons of McDonalds and are somehow magically fit and reasonably healthy anyway. If McDonalds could create tons of these people they could not only have a higher consumer base but actually remove the stigma against them. No need to warn your children not to eat McDonalds every single meal if it actually doesn't harm them, or at least not as strongly or as visibly.
The other thing that stood out to me about that section is that the logic there does not quite follow. Suppose someone's child would have lived to age 65, but thanks to polygenetic embryo selection was able to live to age 66 instead. This costs the US government more money, not less, because they have to pay one year of medical expenses instead of zero.
I think where this will work, if it works at all, will be in things like "does this embryo have CF or not?" and we can then see if the babies born do or do not develop CF. It'll work where there is a discernible, measurable problem and the result can be discernible and measured: "did the baby develop CF or spina bifida or the rest of it?"
That is a case that can be argued for public health benefits.
The stuff about "taller, smarter, prettier" and the rest? Will always be pie in the sky. Maybe the selected embryo is smarter than if you had gone the natural route, maybe the unselected baby would have been smart anyway. Roll those dice and hope for the jackpot!
It seems to me that using this technology not for vanity but to eliminate such a tragic condition as CF - I recall reading an obituary once, “he was preceded in death by … (his brother, his brother, his brother, his sister)” - would be the necessary justification for selecting for IQ.
Very smart people surely made it possible, but if they can’t get this right … what good were they?
It is important to know that we have made significant advances in treatment for CF over the last few decades. In 2022, the estimated median predicted survival age for a baby born in the UK with CF was 56. In 2023, it was 64. I’d expect to hear the prediction for babies born in 2024 around October. This is extraordinary progress.
It is no longer a disease which guarantees an early death, as it was relatively recently. And the progress is continuing and rapid.
Not yet! They’ve been working on gene-editing therapies for ages: some have looked promising, but I’m not aware of any success yet. It’s been the big thing people have hoped for.
I'm a parent via IVF. When we were weighing the decision to do embryo screening, our providers lightly recommended against it on the following grounds: we are relatively young (mid-30s) and thus comparatively unlikely to have significant age-based aneuploid concerns; and any genetic screening would necessarily involve removal of cells from the embryo which has a non-insignificant chance of disrupting its viability. Can you speak to that latter concern? Particularly for the current userbase of IVF, viability of pregnancy is a pretty paramount topic!
"As with any medical procedure, embryo biopsy carries some risks. There is a small chance (less than 1-2% with a skilled embryologist) that the embryo may be damaged during the biopsy, causing it to stop developing or making it unsuitable for transfer. While current data suggests that embryo biopsy has no adverse impact on the growth or medical outcomes of the resulting children, it's essential to understand that the technique is still relatively new, and there may be potential unknown consequences for live-born babies. If you're considering PGTA for your frozen embryos, our article on getting Orchid's screening on frozen embryos provides valuable information."
If embryo biopsy results in a 1-2% chance of serious enough damage that the embryo is damaged enough "to stop developing or mak[e] it unsuitable for transfer," my guess is that that's just the tip of the iceberg, and that more subtle damage is being done to a larger percentage of embryos as well.
My understanding is that a small percentage -- like 5%? -- of embryos are damaged by genetic sampling. There's a newer non-invasive way to test the genetic material in the substrate around the embryo. I bet this will become more common. (I'm no expert, just have done some reading)
One thing that concerns me is the suggestion in the research that IVF conception itself may increase the risk of certain kinds of cancers, particularly with frozen embryo transfer. I think studies say this is a pretty small risk at this point, but if there's a massive increase in people using IVF, it may become a bigger issue.
So would it be fair to effectively "nerf" all of the health benefits quoted above by 5% given that likelihood of the testing being damaging? That certainly affects the final expected value.
Yes, obviously it wouldn't be transferred. But you've lost that embryo. For many current users of IVF, the number of viable embryos that are retrieved is worryingly small, sometimes even just one or two per egg retrieval. If the embryo is damaged, they've gone from "reasonable likelihood of a healthy child" to "no child".
I guess I'm confused because if the data is about reducing risk of conditions for babies that are actually carried to term and born, then 5% of total embryos lost are unlikely to significantly change those improved outcomes.
Average number of eggs per retrieval is 8-14, they are graded by viability. It's true some women produce fewer eggs per retrieval and in that instance may forgo genetic testing because of that, but those are a minority of current IVF patients who are mostly doing IVF because of fertility problems just like that (insufficient egg supply).
Also there is a new method for testing embryos by testing the genetic material that exists in the substrate around the embryo. It's noninvasive to the embryo, and I think we're going to see more of this technique in the coming years because of this concern.
I'm also interested in the possible impact on the balance of men and women in a population. Most of the people I know doing IVF (which is not that many) are making choices about embryos based on sex along side genetic factors. Is anyone talking about this? Do fertility clinics have data about whether these sex-based choices are tipping in one direction or the other?
I see from reading around that IVF skews male though this seems tied to what kind of IVF technology is used rather than because people's choices are skewing outcomes. Maybe too soon to say on that.
People who tell you they're selecting for sex will tell you they prefer girls. I'm guessing there's substantial stigma around selecting for boys, to the point where you'd get IQ or something instead as the reason.
Roughly speaking? Feminism. More Targetted? China's One Child Policy. More thoughtfully? "I might have to explain this one." (you might have to explain "why girl" as well, but that's "easier to domesticate", rather than "I like the zany, adventurous ones!").
When you might be looking for "the highest IQ baby possible" you're looking for boys, after all. (average IQ higher is girls, of course).
This may be the result of overly cautious providers, but it may be particular to your embryos. If your embryos developed slowly and were frozen at a later-than-optimal stage of development (day 5 is preferred, but many providers will use and freeze days 6 and 7) or if your embryos appeared low grade under the microscope, genetic testing could cause sufficient trauma to the embryo to lose the embryo, especially if a freeze-thaw cycle is involved. This might also be recommended if you have very few embryos.
Removal of the cells for testing has a pretty small chance of harming the embryo under standard/ideal conditions, which is to say removal of cells for PGT-A/-M after fertilization but before initial freezing.
It's best when testing embryos to know upfront (i.e. before freezing) which testing you want to do, and even then testing is not an equal risk for all embryos.
And on average, two-thirds of patients require six or more IVF cycles for a successful pregnancy. At 15-20K a pop that could make a significant cost difference if the Herasight tests reduce the viability of embryos.
So I'm not actually an expert on this, but I did work at a genetic testing company for a year and I've talked with pretty much everyone in the field.
From everything I've read and heard, a trophectoderm biopsy (the standard kind of biopsy taken in IVF) has a negligible impact on live birth rates. I wish I could give you an actual number here like "the impact on llive birth rates is <X% based on this study", but my knowledge is not that deep.
There ARE studies showing that biopsies of the inner cell mass (the part of the embryo that becomes the actual fetus) do have an impact on success rates, but those aren't commonly practiced by clinics.
No doubt I'm an idiot, but why the focus on Type 2 diabetes, which is far more lifestyle-related, rather than on Type 1, which is far more genetically based? Also, I have Type 1 in my family.
It's only 90% if you do some goofy thing where you restrict cases to people who developed it at <5 years of age. The AUC for a more realistic case cutoff (<15) is still quite good, but not that good.
Probably because there is a correlation between people who choose their embryos and good life choices/upbringing. So you have a nice data point for your advertisement which will most likely be much lower if you control for this stuff.
I'm curious to know if the risks to the baby have been taken into account here. Not the risks of embryo selection, but the risks of IVF in the first place. Obviously if a couple is having IVF for (eg) fertility reasons, an embryo has to be picked, whatever metric is used. But having IVF purely for embryo selection could be counterproductive, if the process itself leads to an increased risk of some adverse effects (eg preterm birth, lower birth weight), as some studies have suggested. That said, most IVF up to now has been done for couples having fertility issues, so it's hard to disentangle causation. Is this something you have looked into, and taken into account?
Yeah, that review confirms and expands on the risks I was previously aware of. It doesn't sound like a set of risks I'd want to take on if I had a decent chance of natural conception or else could really significantly reduce the absolute risk of serious problems via genetic selection. The cons of current technology still seem like for most people they far outweigh the pros in the OP that are now apparently possible.
Having done IVF, the article dramatically underplays how invasive and utterly miserable the entire process is for women. It involves giving yourself hundreds of hormone shots that swell your ovaries to the size of pomelos, undergoing surgical egg removal (which gave me weeks of internal bleeding), and then giving yourself daily intramuscular shots into your butt for weeks after the embryo is transferred. You can’t exercise or have sex during any of this. It’s common to gain 15-20 pounds. And if course, the hormones themselves make you miserable.
There is NO WAY I - or most women - would ever do IVF if natural conception was an option.
Also, most couples (who are there for infertility, remember) end up with one or two usable embryos, and would never have the luxury of being as picky as this article imagines.
Many of these traits represent our society's current values. Even the disease ADHD is mainly a disease because of the current cultural milieu. Is it wise to increase selection pressure as much as these technologies are likely to when they trickle down, given the transitory arbitrariness of the criteria? I can see reducing Alzheimer's and cancer. But I'm uneasy about many of the other criteria.
If having ADHD (to the extent it's a disease) is advantageous in some way, then there will end up being a shortage of people who do whatever jobs people with ADHD are good at, meaning parents will stop selecting against it because they want their kids to be able to get good jobs.
I can easily imagine a tragedy-of-the-commons situation where something is beneficial to society but not to individuals : maybe the jobs ADHD people are good at are low status or otherwise undesirable in a way that can't be corrected by economics in the way you describe. Or ADHD suddenly becomes valuable because of environmental changes. But this doesn't seem terribly likely?
This is by far the least convincing argument against eugenics I've ever heard. Oh no, there'll only be one billion kinds of person instead of one hundred billion, only more worthwhile art being created every week than anyone can can consume in a lifetime instead of every day, what a tragedy.
I worry about the environmental changes first, because our world is changing at a very rapid rate, but I think the "something is beneficial to society but not to individuals" is underrated. Imagine AIs paid in "content" -- lolcows become a very valuable commodity for a society, then. Regardless of how well they do for themselves.
re: environmental changes I'm hopeful that reduced genetic diversity won't matter a ton because humans have adapted to pretty extremely different environments in the past with changes in memes not genes. Humans *have* adapted genetically to changing environs (high altitude tibetans adapting to low oxygen, duplication of genes to metabolize grains post agricultural revolution... etc.) But these are really quite minor compared to the way humans have adapted to new environs through new technologies (consider the Inuit! Or space travel!)
Even without embryo selection, every population outside Africa is already very homogeneous due to founder effects and rapid population growth and we've done OK. So to be honest I'm not terribly worried that embryo selection will eliminate some essential diversity. Though it is a frightening idea.
You missed our evolutionary adaptations as "fire users" (which seem to be quite extreme).
Manic Depression or other psychological "brainstates" may be what's necessary to make geniuses. (Not that I'm saying every genius was the Romantic Ideal, many are workhorses -- but even they can go through cycles of "up" and "down" -- or inability to start projects because "there's so many ways to start it!")
By "evolutionary adaptations as fire users" are you referring to co-evolution with technology (e.g. we can't extract enough calories to reproduce without some kind of fire/cooking)?
Right now I'm not persuaded by the idea that genius is connected to mental illness, but if it turns out to be so that definitely would suggest embryo selection against mental illness could be pretty bad! That would be its own interesting moral dilemma. "This embryo has X% chance of debilitating mental illness but Y% chance of being a genius and benefiting lots of other people."
I worry that the equilibrium might not shake out to be that adequate. Parents make bad and silly decisions about their children's lives and future all the time, and status game spirals can often take over parts of human culture quite thoroughly.
One problem is the feedback time is too long: if there are actually jobs people with ADHD are good at (but fewer than the amount of people with ADHD today), the issue that we select too much against ADHD will only become apparent 20–30 years after embryo selection becomes widespread, so we'll have an entire generation of people too heavily selected against ADHD.
The vast majority of congenital conditions are universally considered harmful. No one's arguing that anencephaly, Proteus syndrome, Sickle cell disease, asthma, bladder exstrophy, or nearly all the others improve a society. These conditions cause great pain independent of any "cultural milieu."
The argument for preserving certain congenital conditions only applies to the tiny fraction of them that some people think provide some benefit like ADHD or high-functioning autism. These conditions won't be selected against as much since many parents will think they are fine, so I don't see this as being a problem.
Should we be maybe trying to create a database of whole-genome sequences and alleles before we start artificially changing the population distribution? Ideally one that is large enough to capture a pretty large chunk of rare alleles?
I think I'm pretty well on the side of "this is probably a good thing", but in the off chance that wide spread use of this technology causes unforseen problems, knowing what our populations genetic distribution looked like before we messed it all up seems pretty useful.
(Admittedly, Ensembl and UCSC are genome browsers, but they include variants and their information, such as frequency, predicted impact, and known phenotypes).
Pangenome sounds pretty much like what I'm envisioning, although, if I'm understanding statements on the website correctly, they are talking about the order of hundreds of full genome sequences. That's a great start, but in my opinion, we should probably be aiming for thousands-to-millions to get a fully representative global sample that is large enough to capture non-trivial amounts of rare alleles.
It's going to be a looooong time before this tech has any noticeable impact on genetic diversity. There are about 10 million genetic variants in the human gene pool with a frequency of at least 1%. Even if you did embryo selection for ten generations, and everyone was selected for the same things, you'd barely move that number.
Frankly, even with more powerful techniques like gene editing or iterated meiotic selection you're going to need many generations before this becomes a big concern.
The only area where I'm somewhat worried about this is the human immune system. We've had crazy amounts of selection on the human immune system in the last 10,000 years, to the point where we literally have higher rates of read errors in genetic sequencing when reading regions like the HLA. It's also harder to judge the tradeoffs you're making when changing immune variants because often they're present to protect against plagues or other uncommon diseases. We can't really phenotype those effects well until there's some sort of pandemic.
HLA pops up in GWASes for every damn trait too, so alleles there might be weighted highly in the predictors these companies are using? (Or maybe they are filtered out, since as you noted it's hard to align to that region?) One can imagine a "tragedy of the commons" situation, where every individual is incentivized to select for a certain set of immune haplotypes that e.g. reduce schizophrenia risk, but this counteracts diversifying selection at that locus, making the population as a whole more vulnerable to disease. But that's just a worst-case I have no strong reason to believe currently.
> We can't really phenotype those effects well until there's some sort of pandemic.
That's a good point. It reminds me of an old saw that goes something like:
Student: The mouse knockout model has no phenotype.
Professor: Well, did you take it to the opera?"
(The joke being that you can't know that the gene doesn't produce a phenotype under opera conditions until you explicitly test it.)
Well the plague protection benefits of some HLA variant would increase as the population as a whole became more vulnerable, so if you have good enough predictors and there is at least some transparency into what other parents are selecting for, this is something that in theory we should be able to avoid.
Though it would obviously be more difficult than the usual kind of selection.
Honestly the hardest part is probably going to be figuring out which HLA or other immune variants protect against which pandemics. This is why I think by default we should be prioritizing immune diversity **relative to other people in the population**
>Well the plague protection benefits of some HLA variant would increase as the population as a whole became more vulnerable
Maybe. It also seems very possible that, rather than the main effect of HLA heterogeneity being "at least someone will have a protective allele when a pandemic hits", HLA heterogeneity is *itself* protective. If most people have the same HLA the pathogen just needs to change its protein sequences to avoid antigen presentation by that one HLA. If we all have different HLAs the pathogen needs to avoid being presented by ANY of them, which dramatically constrains it & reduces transmissibility in a population, preventing outbreaks. So your neighbor's HLA diversity could benefit you.
(This is not to mention the specter of other nasty things like transmissible cancers that can result from low genetic diversity in immune genes).
>if you have good enough predictors and there is at least some transparency into what other parents are selecting for, this is something that in theory we should be able to avoid.
Absolutely. I would bet that by the time that embryo selection became wide-spread enough to start seriously affecting allele frequencies the tech will have improved enough that we can just give kids whatever MHC to promote diversity relative to the population just as you suggest & this whole thing will be a moot point.
Who says we aren't artificially changing the population distribution? We have had significant manmade interventions on the population scale side, and they may have reproductive effects.
It seems kind of rude to say Kenyan pastoralists get weather predictions from a Shaman instead of being able to connect to the same exact up-to-the-minute weather satellite data as everyone else
I'll bet I can predict with great accuracy whether 90 days from now it will be hotter or colder than today in a given city in the world. Not perfectly (gets fuzzier in the tropics) but generally, November has different temperatures than August in most places and the direction of weather is practically always in one direcction.
It's exciting to see how this field is progressing! My wife and I will likely be customers of one of these companies in the near future.
Regarding SMN and spinal muscular atrophy, the SMN gene is rather difficult to analyze because there are regions of the genome (SMN pseudogenes) that look very similar. Still, difficult is not impossible and I'd expect Nucleus to do better, given that the focus of their company is genetic testing. (See: https://www.illumina.com/science/genomics-research/articles/HBA-SMN-genotyping.html)
And regarding cost, hopefully this will come down in the near future. The cost for genotyping/sequencing should be, at most, in the low hundreds of dollars per embryo, and I think now that this kind of selection is starting to be within the Overton window, we'll see competition drive down the price. So most of the costs will end up being IVF.
Furthermore I think companies which do the actual genotyping/sequencing (GP and Orchid, right now) will end up with a competitive advantage in the long term.
Here's another concern I have about IVF becoming more widespread in order to access genetic testing... and it's about the physical and psychological impact on women. It's an unbelievably demanding process above and beyond pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood which are already incredibly demanding. Anyone who has done it can speak to what a very hard road it is for most women.
Last I checked, something like 70% of women going through IVF experience clinical levels of anxiety and depression. About half of women under 35 get pregnant in the first cycle, so even younger women are likely to need to go through more than one cycle and women over 35 even more.
Though I should add that most (not all) IVF right now happens to address infertility issues and that's no doubt part of the psychological anguish of the process. But the hormones, pain, unpredictability, cost, risk, etc etc even without infertility are still quite a load.
One thing you're not taking into account here is just how much worse IVF outcomes are for women with known fertility issues.
If you're having trouble conceiving, IVF can help but your odds still won't necessarily be that great. This is especially true for women in their late 30s or early 40s. If you're under 35 and you have no fertility issues, your odds of having a kid via even just a single round of IVf are around >85%
What really makes people go crazy with IVF is multiple rounds of egg retrieval, implantation, and failure. Yes there are unpleasant side-effects of the medications you need to take, but the things that really drives people crazy is not being able to have the child they so desperately want.
My husband and I are currently doing IVF to polygenically screen our children with Herasight (my retrieval is next Tuesday). And I think I would say that while infertility is hell, IVF is not that bad
My experience with IVF has been exciting and kinda fun. I’m lucky that I haven’t really had bad side effects so far (in fact I feel great - the progesterone they have me on has improved my sleep 1000%, and I am going to ask if I could potentially continue with it after IVF). It also helps that I don’t really mind needles, and also that our numbers look great (my AMH and AFC are nice and high). The most annoying part is the cost (probably about 8k all up for this round). We are paying out of pocket, and going to a super low cost clinic (CNY)
I think the fact that we are expecting a great result (lots of embryos, and eventually happy healthy babies) makes the cost/discomfort feel more like a worthwhile sacrifice. Going through all this and not getting a single healthy embryo would suck enormously.
I don’t want to downplay how hard IVF is for most women - but I do think that most of the depression and anxiety associated with the experience comes from the fact that infertility is really, really awful, and the constant vacillating between sadness and hope would do anyone’s head in. The actual IVF process is (not always) that bad
I'm glad your IVF is going well, and hope you have wonderful healthy children!
If anyone else reading this *does* really mind needles, they should be aware that the topical anesthetic EMLA cream can significantly reduce the pain of needles. Common practice is often to apply it just half an hour, or so, before injections, but the literature shows it's actually most effective when left on for several hours before an injection.
EMLA is available over the counter in some countries (like Canada), and requires a prescription in others (like the US).
Topical anesthetics should arguably be incorporated as standard options for procedures involving needles, but since they aren't, patients who might want them need to pursue them, themselves.
Can I ask your age and the attrition rate from eggs to blasts you experienced at CNY? I'm in the process of choosing a clinic to do IVF in order to polygenically screen, and I've been a bit wary of CNY's lower success rates (unsure how much of that is due to selection effects).
I've also considered doing an egg share program where the retrieval and meds are free in exchange for giving away half the retrieved eggs, but I'm not blessed with a high AMH/ACF, so it would take me a ridiculous number of retrievals to end up with enough embryos for polygenic screening to make sense.
I was feeling pretty sad about the maturity rate. It seems like my cohort ended up pretty asynchronous, which is something I want to work on for next time. I think fertilisation to blast rate is usually about 50%, so I was expecting like 8 blasts. But I got the call today that I have 13 blasts! (4 day 5, and 9 day 6), and potentially one day 7 blast.
So overall pretty pleased with CNY. I think my med regime needs to be tweaked, but the CNY embryology lab accomplished great things in terms of fertilisation/incubation.
The official CNY success numbers are not great, but I think this is impacted by the fact that they will literally take anyone, and often take people who other clinics have turned away (super high bmi, advanced maternal age, other issues).
I actually think they are perfect for people doing polygenic embryo screening. If you are not infertile, and are doing IVF purely for screening reasons, you can get great results from CNY for like 1/3 of the cost of the average IVF clinic
I think I spent about 7k at CNY (that includes retrieval, meds, monitoring, bloods etc). And I will spend $5,700 to PGTA test the 13 embryos ($200 per embryo sampling fee from CNY, and then $3,100 to cooper genomics (the PGTA testing company). So about 13k all up. I think it would be a struggle to get a cheaper rate, even if you went to south america or Cyprus.
- I think that all future costs should be time discounted (the why is a whole debate over ethics and economics, but I come down strongly pro). By that argument this somehow comes out as not worth it (per your calculations), despite how great it sounds.
- I'm calling baloney on a 6iq point gain being worth that little. If we were incorporating the uncertainty about it (10% chance it works as promised otherwise you get nothing), then maybe, but an actual 6 point IQ gain can't possibly be worth only a five or six figure sum of money.
Scott cites Zagorsky (2007) for the estimate and there are a few of reasons to think the true value would be higher.
First, Zagorsky (2007) is based on a 2004 survey, but in skimming the study, it doesn't look like they adjusted for inflation between 2004 and 2007, which was about 10%. Scott seems to have adjusted for inflation since 2007, but if I'm right, the adjustment should have been about 10% higher.
Second, simply adjusting for CPI from 2007 (or even 2004) probably underestimates the modern equivalent estimate. That's because over time, people have become richer in real terms. Higher IQ presumably shifts you along the income distribution, but since the country is richer than it was in 2004 (with real GDP per capita increasing by about a third) an equivalent SD shift would have a greater impact.
Fourth, and probably most importantly, reanalyses of the Zagorsky data show higher correlations than Zagorsky found. For example, Dalliard (2016): https://humanvarieties.org/2016/01/31/iq-and-permanent-income-sizing-up-the-iq-paradox/ found that when considering multiple years of data, the return of 1 IQ point to permanent income is $1,130 (95% CI: 1048-1213) in 2011 dollars, or $950 in 2004 dollars, more than double the Zagorsky estimate.
Using log-transformed income data to address non-linearity, he finds that the affect of 1 IQ point is an increase in income of 2.5%, such that the affect of 6 IQ points would be an increase of income of 16%.
Scott's estimate implies that 6 IQ points would boost annual income by $4,020. Per Dalliard, that would only be true if one's salary without the IQ boost would be $25,125. In other words, per Dalliard, it wildly underestimates it.
For the median salary in the US of $62,088, the annual income boost would be $9,915. For readers interested who presumably have higher than median expected earnings, the boost would be larger, yet.
And my third point applies to Dalliard as well as Zagorsky, suggesting that modern data might show an even higher estimate for Dalliard's analysis. Indeed, the Tweet above shows precisely that - for the same data being referenced above (but different years), the effect of IQ on income (for given ages) was significantly larger for the cohort born in 1997 than the cohort born in 1979.
After writing this, I see that the analysis in the Tweet came from here: https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/how-profitable-is-embryo-selection which actually addresses this very topic, estimating the effect of a 1 IQ point increase on total lifetime earnings of between $40,000 and $90,000, ignoring discounting, just as Scott did in footnote 8.
Damn. I was rushing to write something about this since yesterday but Scott beat me to it.
All I’ll say is that I have a feeling this will be one of those incredibly transformative technologies that change the course of human history forever. I’m somewhat of an ASI skeptic, so I imagine a relatively near future where 3 generations of this technology rapidly improving leads to a real sense of “super babies.” There’s enough sci-fi written about this idea that it’s not important for me to go into all the interesting utopias and dystopias this might lead to.
I think ASI will render this stuff moot in a few years, but if humanity had any will to not die, this is how. We'd halt the AI race, make ourselves smarter through genetic engineering, and then try our hands at solving alignment with our newfound wisdom.
I see your point that you're building on the same architecture, and raising them to have positive feelings towards other humans. But depending on how far they are ahead of baseline humanity, they may not be interested in allowing baseline humanity to participate in collective decisions - they would see it as like allowing children to vote and bind adults to their decisions. I agree that there's a difference between that and an ASI, but I'm not convinced there isn't any overlap between the problems.
Hera is goddess of marriage. Ilithyia is the goddess of childbirth, and Hera used her to delay the birth of Heracles so his kinsman Eurystheus could be born first and become king:
"On the night Heracles and Iphicles were to be born, Hera, knowing of her husband Zeus's adultery, persuaded Zeus to swear an oath that the child born that night to a member of the House of Perseus would become High King. Hera did this knowing that while Heracles was to be born a descendant of Perseus, so too was Eurystheus. Once the oath was sworn, Hera hurried to Alcmene's dwelling and slowed the birth of Heracles and Iphicles by forcing Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, to sit cross-legged with her clothing tied in knots, thereby causing the twins to be trapped in the womb. Meanwhile, Hera caused Eurystheus to be born prematurely, making him High King in place of Heracles. She would have permanently delayed Heracles's birth had she not been fooled by Galanthis, Alcmene's servant, who lied to Ilithyia, saying that Alcmene had already delivered the baby. Upon hearing this, she jumped in surprise, loosing the knots and inadvertently allowing Alcmene to give birth to Heracles and Iphicles."
So, um, yeah: great patron for picking and choosing who is going to be born for which traits, not so much for "child will have happy life afterwards".
Oh definitely, just not (it would appear, if even Scott is confused as to what Hera is the patron deity of) the associations customers think they are invoking.
"Hi! Our patron is in fact the goddess of marriage, not childbirth, and very vengeful about adultery or non-marital relationships, and very much up for revenge on the offspring of same! So let's all be certain that you're married, not to other people, and having babies under traditional norms or else there might be serpents in the cradle - so to speak" 😁
Worked out pretty well for Hephaestus. He got his own forge in a giant volcano, and married to the goddess of love/lust (even if she cucks him most of the time).
I really, really wish that Scott and other effective altruists took the personhood objection seriously.
I'm not talking about the primary concern that Scott mentions in the linked post, "Who Does Polygenic Selection Help?"; I'm talking about the secondary, "pro-life" concern--the concern that, beginning at fertilization, a human embryo has moral value that's similar in magnitude to a newborn baby, and so abandoning or destroying it is morally akin to abandoning or killing a newborn baby.
Although the philosophical positions that underlie that concern aren't ironclad, I think it's the most plausible account of when humans acquire moral value. At the very least, it's a *plausible* account. Consequently, that should make EAs very reluctant to advocate for a practice that might grow to result in the industrialized killing of millions (perhaps billions) of people per year.
The closest that Scott comes to addressing this is saying that if we threw out polygenic selection on these grounds, then we would have to throw out IVF too. So be it. I don't think that the moral correctness of IVF is a reasonable anchor for our intuition whatsoever.
Even Scott's claim that polygenic screening doesn't exacerbate the issue is seriously wrong. In classic IVF, the purpose of creating multiple embryos is to increase the probability of pregnancy. This number has a conservative upper bound to minimize the possibility of triplets, quadruplets, etc. In contrast, the ideal number of embryos for polygenic screening is practically unlimited, because almost none of them are intended to be implanted. Knowledgeable proponents like Gene Smith and Jonathan Anomaly advocate for batches of dozens, if not hundreds, of embryos per pregnancy. This would easily increase the impact of the ethical question by a factor of 10. Furthermore, if polygenic screening becomes the norm (as some advocate), then the impact will increase by an *extra* factor of at least 20, based on current IVF rates.
I understand the appeal of polygenic screening. I really do--and if it wasn't for the issue of embryonic rights, I would be an avid proponent. As it stands, though, we risk creating an entrenched moral catastrophe akin to the next factoring farming, and the people who pride themselves about their quantitatively informed moral sensibilities don't seem willing to properly wrestle with it.
An embryo at the stages we're talking about here is a double-digit number of cells. It doesn't even have a nervous system, and seems less conscious than an insect, let alone a newborn. If you're coming at this from the abortion debate, where we're talking about fetuses with beating hearts and semi-working brains, your intuitions will be totally off. I think if you want to argue for embryo rights, you need some non-materialist conception of what personhood is or why it matters, which is going to be a hard sell.
I don't think that embryonic rights require a non-materialist account of personhood--at least not in a way that's suspicious.
Suppose that while you're walking in the woods, you encounter a hermit who's fast asleep. If you had a way of killing him instantly, would it be morally acceptable to do so? He's not currently experiencing any desires, he wouldn't feel any pain while being killed, and nobody would miss him.
If you consider that to be murder, then what's the morally relevant difference between the hermit and an embryo? Surely it's not the nervous system itself that's morally significant; it's the capacity for consciousness that we associate with the nervous system. A human embryo also has this capacity; it's merely a step farther removed from manifesting this capacity. The embryo has to grow a nervous system, but why is that different from the hermit having to wake up?
How is this different from saying that a couple that has three kids but chooses not to have a fourth is murdering their fourth kid, and exactly as culpable as a couple that has four kids and then kills one?
I think I would solve the hermit situation by saying that the hermit has a preference against dying (ie formed this preference when he was awake), and that preference can't be ignored just because he's asleep right now.
I think a good criteria for moral standing is existence and the potential for consciousness. An embryo has both, a sleeping hermit has both, an unconcieved child does not.
I don't think your hermit explanation holds up - why is an assumed past preference to live any more valuable than the assumed future preference to live that an embryo has?
I agree that the preference explanation doesn't suffice: even if we suppose that the hermit was temporarily depressed, with no desire to survive, it's still bad if they die when they would have otherwise recovered and lived a happy future life.
The better explanation is that the hermit is psychologically continuous with their (possible) future self. An embryo isn't. (See my reply to Matthew's comment for more detail.)
Could you give a more detailed account of why you think an embryo has "potential for consciousness" but (you seem to imply) an unfertilized egg does not?
The unfertilized egg requires an outside intervention to eventually become conscious, but this seems true of an embryo in a test tube as well; neither is going to develop into a healthy baby without a great deal of outside help.
to better phrase what i said above, existence as something with the potential for consciousness gives moral standing. An unfertilized egg does not meet that - it has to completely change through fertilization to have that potential. An embryo in a test tube only needs the right conditions to develop consciousness. other choices can be argued, but i think fertilization is the most reasonable as far as yielding a radical step change from no standing to standing.
It sounds like on your theory, sperm should have moral standing, which is pretty bad news.
Or suppose that one day robots become conscious. There is a lump of metal in the robot factory. Does it have moral standing, since it could one day be turned into a robot?
I just don't think we need to worry about things that don't have moral standing yet, just because they theoretically could in some future which is not going to happen.
I do think you need to have something like an assumption that past preferences extend into the future to value anyone's preferences at all. Suppose I don't want someone to scream in my ear. I'm probably not thinking about that at this exact moment. You need to sort of abstract my into a continuously-existing being in order to respect that preference and not scream in my ear.
(another reason not to grant embryos moral standing is that I think more than half of embryos that implant are spontaneously aborted because the body decides it doesn't like them for some reason. If we thought embryos had moral standing, this would become the worst genocide in history, and the most important cause would be inventing some kind of artificial womb to save them. But in fact I predict most people don't care about this very much.)
We used to have 50% child mortality. Most people couldn’t do anything about it and just accepted it. Not a genocide, because it’s not the intentional killing of a particular ethnic group, but definitely a mass tragedy.
For infertile couples, if we could end that spontaneous abortion, they’d be happy to have their children. For other couple as well, this kind of miscarriage is probably as sad as losing a newborn would’ve been in cultures that prevented naming until 6+ weeks to avoid being attached.
The argument from consequences isn’t a good one because humans have accepted plenty of bad consequences before we had the capability to end them.
I don’t think an individual sperm is alive in the way an embryo is. An embryo needs food, water, and shelter to grow. From the moment of conception its life plan is determined. A sperm needs an egg, and different eggs will result in different life plans (genes). Much much less deterministic. I think you can say that “you” were once an embryo. I don’t think you can say you were once that sperm, because that sperm could really have become anybody else
My line is existence as something with potential for consciousness. I don't think a sperm qualifies as a person, so doesn't qualify.
I'm going to call robot moral standing out of scope (we're having a hard enough time with people).
Your idea about a moral obligation to stop the genocide of embryos through science is very interesting though. I hadn't thought of this from an EA perspective. I think this still works though - GiveWell says right now it costs 3k to save a life in Nigeria. To argue for devoting your altruism to saving embryos, you'd have to be convinced you could find something that costs less than 3k per embryo (accounting for any suffering from the procedure) plus the up front research cost. I don't think that's likely, but if you could I think I'd be for it.
EDIT: see my response to Matthew Milone's response to me. I am not calling you a blatant murderer in this comment.
I agree with others that there is a significant difference between an embryo and a sperm. An embryo is an organism that has the complete genetic information it needs for a human body and (unless someone puts a stop to it or deprives it of a healthy environment) is already at work building it's human body. It isn't a building block in the same way that a sperm or a hot meal is. It is a living organism that is consuming energy in order to build up and develop into what it already completely *is*, not in order to become something other. Nothing further is added to it for the rest of its life other than sustenance.
A sperm isn't like that. A sperm is happy to go it's whole life swimming around and then to die. No matter how much sustenance you give it, it won't develop any further. You need to combine it with a whole different organism for it to become something other than it was, and from there it's a human, no longer a sperm or an egg. I agree that you can't grant moral standing to a lump of clay or to sperm, but that doesn't have anything to do with an embryo, which is a human at the very beginning of its development, not a building block of a human.
As for the issue of spontaneous abortions: I admit that it's pretty hard for me to feel emotions instinctively about a human that still only consists of a few cells (at least ones that I can't see--something weird triggers inside me when I see imaging of an embryo), but thinking about the fact you bring up I do think it's tragic. I think there is not much that the average person could do to solve the problem other than not to try to have kids, but I don't think they would be guilty of a death from the woman's body rejecting the embryo, just as they wouldn't be guilty if their child later died of cancer. Both are bodies not operating as they should.
Just because the average person is unable to do anything about a common cause of embryo (human) death, I don't think that justifies them in intentionally killing a different embryo.
That's a simple explanation, but I really do believe it's as simple as that. For someone like you, who has studied and thought about these kinds of things extremely extensively, I would imagine it would be incredibly difficult for you to think of it in simple terms like this. I wouldn't blame you. And if one day you change your mind and feel guilty of the murder of your own children (although if the embryos are frozen then technically they're not murdered, but that's still a really weird moral ground. I was very surprised just now when I googled it, though, to find out that there are embryos from 30+ years ago being unfrozen and allowed to develop into babies) I don't think any reasonable person would condemn you for it aside from your own self. If you don't belive in God, then what's the point anyway. And if you one day come to believe and have faith in Jesus, he will have compassion and forgiveness for you.
To produce a conscious robot, a lump of metal must be augmented with far, far more information/structure/complexity than it already has. In contrast, a human embryo requires very little additional complexity to produce a conscious human, relative to its current complexity.
I think that's the important sense in which a human embryo has the capacity to become conscious, but a piece of metal does not. Similarly, a sperm cell requires something that is just as complex as itself (the egg) to gain consciousness. I think this also contributes demarcating identity. In other words, it's part of why we can say "you were an embryo" but not "you were a sperm".
Regarding continuity of preferences: I think that most of the intuitive force in your example actually comes from the fact that screaming in someone's ear is inherently unpleasant. If you didn't know that someone screaming next to your ear would be unpleasant, it would still be nearly or exactly as immoral for me to do so.
Joan nicely addresses your point about the miscarriage rate. I have some more thoughts about it, but they're tangential.
Please bear in mind that most of these potential consciousnesses die. Also bear in mind that something like 50% of Americans signed up for interventions which would directly lead to "the potential for consciousness" being terminated. (ahem, okay, only half of them were female, and some of not childbearing age -- you still didn't see people (who weren't Jewish and in Israel) running around issuing fatwahs about the intervention).
True, but lots of unfortunate things happen, I don't think this can be used to justify purposely causing them to happen. I'm not sure what you're referencing with 50% of Americans, but i've seen the choices approximately 50% of Americans have made, and it doesn't really inspire confidence in them being a barometer for morality.
>How is this different from saying that a couple that has three kids but chooses not to have a fourth is murdering their fourth kid, and exactly as culpable as a couple that has four kids and then kills one?
The standard answer would be that fertilised eggs, unlike hypothetical people, have at least some form of moral personhood, by virtue of having a complete complement of DNA.
If you trace a person back through time you'll find they change a lot as they regress into a child, then a baby, then a fetus, but there's one discontinuous point beyond which you can't say that "this person" still exists, and that's the point where that egg combined with _this particular_ sperm rather than any other.
That's the standard (non-religious) version of the Life Begins At Conception argument, anyway.
Thanks for your replies. I wish that I responded more quickly, but I've been moving to a new apartment this weekend. I have no hard feelings if you've moved on to other conversations.
In the first case, the fourth child doesn't exist, and something that doesn't exist can't be murdered. Ultimately, it comes down to personal identity being traceable to roughly as far back as fertilization. I'll elaborate on that below your reply to Geran.
Regarding the hermit problem: see Richard Y. Chappell's response:
No the fourth child DOES exist. The particles that would make him/her up do exist in the universe thus the unmanifest body in this state belongs to them.
Why not start with personal identity starting here if you aren't willing to join personal identity with when conscious experience begins?
A sleeping hermit has a mind, even if their mental states aren't being actively processed. It's completely different from merely having a "potential" to form mental states after a bunch of further development.
I think there's an absolutely decisive argument that embryos aren't harmed by death. It's that only beings with minds can be harmed at all.
Many philosophers (from Locke through to Parfit) have been convinced that some kind of psychological continuity is what matters in survival. Here's why: If a mad scientist scanned my brain, disintegrated my body, and then wiped your brain and implanted all of my mental traits (memories, beliefs, values, personality, etc.) in its place, then it seems that I have gotten the better half of the deal. I have survived and you have not. Though your body is the one that lives on, it is our minds that matter, and it seems that your mind has been replaced by mine. In making this judgment, we implicitly judge that it is the content of a mind that matters -- the memories, beliefs, desires, and so forth -- not its "location" in a particular body, or even a particular brain.
Suppose this scenario goes ahead. I wake in your body and return to my old life (as best I can). Does this make any difference to you? Suppose you're told beforehand that after your mind is wiped and replaced with mine, I'll go on to live a happy life. Or maybe you're told that I'll be killed the next day. You might for altruistic reasons prefer the former news, but do you think that you are harmed if the latter outcome occurs instead? If not, this goes to show that preventing future pleasures from being experienced in your body is no harm to you, if you are not the one who will get to experience them.
It follows that mindless embryos cannot "survive" (in the moral sense, i.e. mentally), and hence aren't harmed or deprived of anything by their biological deaths.
I follow what you're saying about the mind being more important than the body, but I dont see how this refutes the idea that denying a pre-conscious, extant being the opportunity to become concious is morally wrong.
Call the embryo 'Emby'. If you agree that you aren't benefited by having me live on in your body, then you should also agree that Emby isn't benefited by having some future person live in their body. Emby can't "become" conscious, any more than you can give my next lecture after I take over your body. Bodies are just husks. It's minds that matter, and Emby isn't one and never will be one.
It seems the crux of our disagreement is the idea that "It's that only beings with minds can be harmed at all"
I think it's pretty common in EA to consider the welfare of future humans who don't even exist yet, much less have minds, in moral calculations. Scott even does in this article ( along the lines of think of the future person who won't have lung cancer because someone selected against it in ivf)
How do you handle this? Do you think future generations have moral standing? If so, how do you square this with them not having minds?
Merely possible people (who never end up existing with minds, e.g. because we go extinct first) can't be harmed. But harms aren't all that matter. It would be better to bring about a future with more happy, valuable lives, and I think we have moral reasons to bring about better rather than worse futures for the world, all else equal. I explain my view of existential harms and benefits in more detail here:
I read your post. I found myself nodding along but wondering why it's reasonable to prefer Joy's existence and not Emby's, especially since Emby is already further down the path to consciousness than Joy.
I believe that you can harm a future person who will exist by making their life worse than it would otherwise have been, but you can't harm a never-existent person by making them not exist at all.
So if I use drugs while I'm pregnant, and this causes me to give birth to a baby with some sort of disability, I am culpable. But if I decide not to have a child, I'm not culpable. And this is true even though if we start with an existing person, killing them is worse than disabling them!
So it's fine to care about future generations in the sense of having good policies that protect the environment for future generations or something, because you are making the lives of people who will exist better off.
So you care about the lives of future generations of people who are theoretical and do not exist yet, but don't care about the existing lives of future people, embryos.
Go back in time to when your kids were embryos. If someone had the power to and decided to destroy them when they were still just a couple dozen cells, and replaced them with different embryos (sorry I don't know what kind of twins you have so modify as needed) would that seem wrong to you?
Now what if someone had the power to, and decided to change which sperm and egg met to create your child/children. There were never embryos of your existing kids, just different ones, but the result is the same as the above example. You wouldn't have the same kids you have, but would it still feel morally wrong?
When I consider this, I think the first scenario is something akin to murder, but the second is not.
This makes sense. So it still comes back to when is someone a person. I still think fertilization makes more since than other options. It sounds like you might say consciousness, I'm curious what benchmark you use for that and when that approximately occurs.
This is good insight into EA. And quite predictable from the very observation of their concern with remote future --which does not exist.
They display quite an inversion from the normal expanding zones of moral concern. One goes out from concern with people near one and time close by, to progressively less concern about places and times distant from us.
Anything whatsoever might be justified by the inversion of this normal process.
Arguments are futile in moral matters. Since arguments can proceed to conclusion only if premises are shared. But between materialists and non-materialists key premises are not shared.
Not sure about "futile". It may be futile discussing the "morals of IVF" outside a real world. But IVF is as much real world as are IUDs, miscarriages and all people alive on this planet. 1. Sure, one can argue that condoms are ok, the pill ambiguous but IUDs 'clearly' morally abhorrent, as they keep a fertilized egg from implanting (why my teacher for Catholic religion was vs. IUDS). In real life, people call them all contraceptives and near all use them according to their preferences (STI a potential problem? Not feeling well with the hormones? Long time planning?), not to "moral" considerations. Looking at miscarriages, one may call 'our Lord: the greatest aborterOAT' - but then it may be for the better not to have all embryos become toddlers.
IVF: if one asked Emby: "Hey, you are in an IVF-clinic, together with 3 siblings: we will check you now and implant the "best one". The other go in the bin. Are you willing to take your 25% chance or shall you prefer the bin right away?" - a smart emby would say: I take my chances.
And sorry to our extreme pro-lifers, humans will not implant AND deliver all their IVF-embies. Nor will they refrain from IUDs nor will they have only 2.3 times sex in their life. Except the protestant couple after "every sperm is sacred". ;) It is selection all the way down.
Fwiw, it's not like iuds are the only option. Condoms, surgery, and the pill (depending on who you believe) solve the problem of wanting to have sex but not wanting to destroy embryos.
Just to check, do you disagree with the following premise?
> "If a mad scientist scanned my brain, disintegrated my body, and then wiped your brain and implanted all of my mental traits (memories, beliefs, values, personality, etc.) in its place, then it seems that I have gotten the better half of the deal. I have survived and you have not."
(fwiw I'm not a materialist, but I still accept a psychological theory of personal identity)
More materially (ha), I fail to appreciate the special perspectives within the embryo vs person debate in the first place. Surely these moral objections either way are themselves the product of Fisherian runaway selection - the heightened awareness of a particular trait with selective advantage. What genetics has originated, genetical intervention may cure.
In the scenario that you describe, you might get the better half of the deal, but only because the combined entity will act as an agent who will pursue your values posthumously. I don't think that the entity *is* you; I think you died. I don't know whether I'd consider the entity to be me or a third person.
Beyond my mere intuition against "you" being the correct answer, that answer is also challenged by a related scenario: suppose the scientist scanned your brain and implanted your mind in my body but *didn't* disintegrate your original body. Which one is you?
It certainly isn't the one with my body--there's no way that the combination of your original body and you original mind has the weaker claim. The destruction of your original body seems incidental, so I'm skeptical that my body becomes the "real" you upon your original body's destruction.
I don't think the correct answer is that *both* bodies are you, either. There's clearly a sense in which they're distinct from one-another, and the identity relation is transitory.
The classic Parfitian view (which I agree with) is that it's a mistake to think there's any deep significance to talk of a "real" you. What matters in survival is just psychological continuity, and in the case you describe I bear the relevant relation to TWO future continuants: double survival, in effect!
This isn't the first time that I've heard of Parfit's work, and although I plan to read him in-depth eventually, I don't have time in the near-term to read more than the linked post.
I think it will suffice to say that we have different accounts of personal identity. Mine is anchored to the structure that produces consciousness (i.e. the organism), whereas yours is anchored to the pattern of conscious experiences.
>it seems that your mind has been replaced by mine.
All it takes to disintegrate this line of reasoning and your philosophical methodology is to say "No it doesn't" and ask "What is your empirical evidence it seems this way to any population sample?"
If you don't find a core premise of the argument compelling, then it won't convince you personally. That's fine - that's just how arguments work. Observing this fact doesn't do anything to "disintegrate" the argument: it remains perfectly compelling to those who do accept the intuitive premise (which in my experience is most people I discuss it with; but no part of the argument depends on broader agreement; it works for those who accept the premises no matter how many others don't).
>If you don't find a core premise of the argument compelling, then it won't convince you personally. That's fine - that's just how arguments work.
That wasn't my point. Of course if all I had to contribute was "Anybody can say nuh uh," I wouldn't contribute it, because then you could just say "Nuh uh" to the part of my previous comment where I said my objection disintegrates your methodology and then proceed to ignore any issue I tried to raise. The point was that "it seems that your mind has been replaced by mine" is a contentious topic that has to be investigated properly - which would entail not just saying "it seems" in place of evidence to justify the claim.
>Observing this fact doesn't do anything to "disintegrate" the argument: it remains perfectly compelling to those who do accept the intuitive premise
It "remains perfectly compelling" insofar as it's taking a position on a contentious topic. But it's not evidence or informative, because you would either be double counting your evidence or begging the question. "It seems that your mind has been replaced by mine" is just expressing a position on psychological continuity in the context of your thought experiment. Once the dialectic is disambiguated in this way, the putative evidentiary force of the argument disintegrates because it's just stating a position on psychological continuity that's rejected by everybody who doesn't already subscribe to it. It was just previously obscured by adding "it seems" before making a truth claim about the position, which misleadingly makes it seem like you've provided more evidence than you have for the position.
>which in my experience is most people I discuss it with
How do you propose to resolve a contestation where I claim "it seems that your mind has [not] been replaced by mine" and I cite my personal relationships as evidence? Presumably that negation of your claim would be accepted by ~57% of philosophers https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4898 as well so it's not like it's impossible for such a social scenario to actually obtain.
1. You don’t kill the hermit because you might find yourself fast asleep in that exact spot in the not-so-distant future—potentially even that very afternoon—and you’d prefer not to be killed. One day, your polygenically selected kids might be sleeping there, or your dog, or you might park your car there…
There’s no version of reality where you return to an embryo and someone else decides whether to take you or not from a polygenic portal.
2. We don’t want to normalize the idea that it’s acceptable to murder people while they’re asleep just because they’re “hermits” at the moment. That’s a slippery slope.
3. Even if you knew for sure that you’d never end up sleeping under that tree, and your kids had all been thoroughly warned about the legendary hermit-killing maniac - a tale they’ll pass down for generations - you still wouldn’t want to be punished for committing murder.
4. If you’re safe from the risk of sleeping there, and you’re also immune from punishment, then… well, it still just feels bad to kill a human being, right? Clicking a button on a Web3.0 app to ask a nurse to select Embryo #7 and freeze the rest is worlds apart from “take this gun and prepare yourself for a lifetime of self-inflicted nightmares.”
5. If you’re a psychopath living in a lawless land where you and your kids are safe but random hermits are not - are you sure it’ll stay that way? Lawless lands tend to attract pesky law-lovers who’d love to come in and take over.
6. And if you’re a psychopath living in that same lawless land with only a month to live due to Stage 4 cancer that no one had a chance to diagnose - then sure, maybe from your perspective it seems fine. But I’ll still judge you, because I don’t like lawless lands and I like people who sleep under trees.
I'm skeptical that this reflects your ordinary moral reasoning. Most of your reasons amount sound more like political considerations about coalition-building, not intrinsic moral value.
Do you apply the same reasoning to aiding third-world countries, reducing animal suffering, or other issues that involve groups which you will never find yourself on the opposite side of?
Ordinary reasoning is represented: I don’t kill people first and foremost because I don’t want to, not because it’s “immoral”. I still wouldn’t do it if it was “moral”.
And as for the hard sell of non-materialist conception, I suppose it is hard sell to those to whom anything smacking of non-materialism is hard sell per se.
But I suppose, to the general population, the hardgoing materialism is a harder sell than non-material conception of personhood.
Is it really correct to say that you have reduced someone’s risk of breast cancer by 46%, if what you’ve really done is closer to replacing them with a different person who is 46% less likely to have breast cancer?"
I don't see this is a question. It's not "this is an existing embryo which is a potential baby and you're just picking the traits for them", it's "this is a collection of existing embryos which are potential babies and you are selecting out one of them to be born by a checklist".
By picking "embryo with the lower risk of breast cancer" you are choosing to let that one develop into a baby that will be born. The other embryos will either be re-frozen for a later attempt if needed, or destroyed. You haven't "reduced someone's risk of breast cancer" (as if, for example, they were an adult and a new drug was invented that stops cancers developing), you've killed the competitors who might have been born and left the survivor with the least risk to be implanted.
Now, if you had *one* embryo and you were doing a little snippity-snippity with CRISPR or something to go "delete this bit here, stitch in a new bit there", then yeah: you're reducing that (potential) person*'s risk of breast cancer. But that's not what this procedure is doing. The other embryos are perfectly able, if implanted, to develop into babies that could be born. You're killing those embryos or at the very least preventing their natural development by sticking them back in the freezer, so you are taking potential people out of existence.
EDIT: And no, that's not the same argument as "you have therefore to have as many babies as possible to allow all potential people to come into being". These embryos now exist in reality and in potential to be viable pregnancies. They're not theoretical or notional, they're the result of someone's sperm fertilising someone else's eggs and are now ready to follow the path of conception to birth, only you chose to do all this in a petri dish instead of by the body.
*I think embryos have personhood but yeah: dumb old believer in stupid sky fairy story here.
Thank you for saying this! I don’t think CRISPR would work on any stage but the zygote (well, in the case of something like cystic fibrosis maybe if half the person’s cells are able to produce the missing protein then the effects of CF wouldn’t be as devastating). But anyways I consider IVF immoral so what do I know. It really makes me sad to see all these rationalists’ inconsistencies in moral reasoning and reminds me that as much as I find interesting a lot of content on this blog the fundamental framework is so different we might as well be living in different galaxies (though Father Brown would remind me that the natural law applies everywhere in the universe). We can’t have honey apparently because of bee suffering but creating embryos just to let them die is a-ok!
Ah yeah, I got into trouble with a former member of the commentariat here because of my Catholic objections to IVF (it was a personal family thing with them so naturally they did feel hurt).
I mean, I think the people currently proposing this do have the best intentions about healthy babies first (get rid of the hereditary diseases) and then 'who could object to smart, happy babies?'
But it's not going to stop there, because it never stops there. The particular genetic selection company may be the first one Scott heard of offering to sell hair/eye colour selection, but a couple years back there was at least one chain of fertility/IVF clinics offering this as a deluxe option for clients.
The fertility industry is an industry, and the purpose of business is to make money. So if people want purple eyed kids with silver coloured hair and six fingers on each foot (yes, I said "foot") and are seven feet tall, and the parents have the money to pay for it, that's what they'll get.
Wait, is your conception of the abortion debate that it's a debate between two sides who both have competing materialist conceptions of personhood? This would be a surprise to me, as I don't think anybody but the most hardcore of transhumanist/rationalist/atheists have a purely materialist conception of personhood.
The anti abortion side is a pretty straightforward metaphysical claim. The soul exists, and is created at conception.
Meanwhile the pro-abortion rights side contains dozens of competing definitions and thresholds of personhood, nearly all of them with some nonmaterialist component at their heart (e.g. "personhood only applies to living things" or "personhood only applies to humans" or "personhood only applies to fetuses post-viability" or "personhood only applies after it exits the womb" or "the threshold for personhood is whether the fetus has nervous system that can respond to external pain") The purely materialist conception (one example is purely physical capacity for information processing, e.g. IIT) is hardly held by anybody except a minorities of principled philosophers and rationalists. And to be honest I think even most of these are fundamentally metaphysical claims, with the possible exception of "personhood simply doesn't exist" (which I personally disqualify on the basis that it seems to imply that ethics don't exist either, which in that case, what's the point of arguing about the ethics of killing a fetus)
Do shrimps have personhood? Because Bulldog, for one, is very much active in ending shrimp suffering and getting us to treat shrimps as if they have rights.
As humans, we have a long, long history of treating "this set of us is fine and are people, those set of them are not fine and are not people so we can do what we like to them and that's okay, we're not doing anything wrong because they're not people".
Making personhood a revocable legal status that can be granted and taken away at whim is not a good precedent.
There's already a push for miscarriage leave here in Ireland (we don't yet have a legal entitlement to such, although there is for a stillbirth). So is a seven week old or twelve week old foetus a baby or not? If you want it, it's a baby and you are a grieving expectant mother if it dies. If you don't want it, it's a clump of cells and you are entitled to terminate that pregnancy and expel the contents of the uterus.
"Maybe baby" is not a great way to think about this entire topic, because if we're worrying about AI rights as future sentient beings, we're already laying the legal and social groundwork for "aw, that ain't no person if it's inconvenient for you for them to be a person".
And I don't think it'll stick at the foetus, either. We've done the "adult human but not a person" thing already in several instances, why not in the Brave New World now the unedited, unselected, stupid (because everyone is supposed to be 115 IQ which is the new normal, not a dumb old 105 IQ clod) human-looking animals are not in possession of personhood as an innate property of their humanity, so we don't have to worry about them. In fact, the kindest thing to do is put them down humanely, like we do with feral animal populations. They just can't have a decent quality of life under the circumstances that society demands of its citizens, they're too lacking.
Uh...looking socially at how miscarriage has been historically treated, the variability of personhood is already well-established. Exodus, for example, provides a fine as the appropriate punishment for someone ending up with a miscarriage from being hit in someone else's fight.
I can't remotely join you on the idea that eight cells has the moral personhood of a newborn baby. I can clarify that IVF doesn't generally any longer involve implanting more than one embryo at a time.
I can also add the reality check that women have to still biologically produce the eggs to be fertilized and that the multiple and high levels of hormones used to produce that many eggs at once is an intense and painful experience and the numbers of eggs that can be produced in any one cycle is quite limited. The average number retrieved in each cycle is 8-14.
"Retrieval" is a surgical procedure under general anesthesia and the process leading up to it is hard and prolonged and demanding. Not all the eggs retrieved will be viable on their own (ie, before being fertilized), others will not grow after being fertilized. It's a long, slow process in other words, and one that does not yield up bunches and bunches viable eggs or embryos. It's extremely hard on women in particular, physically and psychologically.
After you replied, I addressed the question of the embryo's moral value in response to Scott's comment.
As for IVF and multiple implantation: noted, but I hope you realize that this reinforces my point about the seriousness of PS relative to standard IVF.
Regarding retrieval: yes, that's how it currently works, but there's a lot of effort going toward widening that bottleneck. For example, Jonathan Anomaly is banking on in-vitro gametogenesis so that "tens of thousands" of embryos can be created from a single vial of blood.
And will we then have "tens of thousands" of births? I'm thinking "Hell, no!" so we now have the potential for massacres in a test tube.
Ain't science wonderful! Shame our moral intuitions can't remotely keep up with our technological ability.
See how easily we've moved from "prevent preventable hereditary diseases" to "mass produce humans, mass murder humans, but all in the clean scientific way not the messy old King Herod way".
It's not a massacre because they're not people. You're engaging in circular reasoning.
Trying to equate the moral worth of embryos with already-born humans is only an insult to the latter. It is not convincing to people who don't already fully agree with you.
We're shaping up for a nice fight, and you are leading off with "poetry? what good that? it not maths!" for an appeal to those who love words.
Dickens wrote an entire novel called "Hard Times" which included a pop at exactly this attitude:
‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.
Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind—no, sir!
...‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s it! You are never to fancy.’
‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’
‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.’
It's not just those who love words - we also care about whether those words contain truth. Beauty is well and good but you can't build a moral system out of it, and shouldn't try.
"Trying to equate the moral worth of embryos with already-born humans is only an insult to the latter."
I am given to understand that there was a very handy legal decision about who are and are not persons.
You see that human-shaped object standing over there? It looks like an adult human and so that's a person? Oh no, my friend, you are gravely mistaken: that is property, like a shovel or a kitchen table or a horse, and trying to equate the moral worth of property with already-born humans is only an insult to the latter:
"On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion. Taney ruled, with three major issues, that:
- Any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States, according to the U.S. Constitution.
- The Ordinance of 1787 could not confer either freedom or citizenship within the Northwest Territory to non-white individuals.
- The provisions of the Act of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise, were voided as a legislative act, since the act exceeded the powers of Congress, insofar as it attempted to exclude slavery and impart freedom and citizenship to non-white persons in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase.
The Court had ruled that African Americans had no claim to freedom or citizenship. Since they were not citizens, they did not possess the legal standing to bring suit in a federal court. As slaves were private property, Congress did not have the power to regulate slavery in the territories and could not revoke a slave owner's rights based on where he lived. This decision nullified the essence of the Missouri Compromise, which divided territories into jurisdictions either free or slave. Speaking for the majority, Taney ruled that because Scott was considered the private property of his owners, he was subject to the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the taking of property from its owner "without due process"."
An earlier interpretation estimated that such property was the equivalent of three-fifths of a real person, but of course that's not a real person in total. Saying that a three-fifths person is of equal moral worth with already-born full five-fifths person humans is only an insult to the latter, is it not?
"In the U.S. Constitution, the Three-fifths Compromise is part of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Irrelevant (and a rather tired argument, I might add).
Yes, it is bad to claim that a person is not a person. It is not bad to claim that a non-person is a not a person. Once again, it matters whether your words are true.
If you tell slaves they're not people, they can tell you that's not true. In fact, it even demonstrates something if they tell you that it *is* true, because it shows they can understand the idea.
In contrast, if you tell an embryo it is not a person, it won't respond because it has no hope of even understanding the question no matter how hard you try to educate it. At the stage at which we'd be talking about IVF, in particular, they have less brain than a fish.
> I know you by the company you keep.
Aren't you Catholic? I don't think guilt by association is the card you want to play, especially if we're going to bring in things that happened before anyone here was born.
Mostly orthogonal to your point, but I’ve met some couples who use polygenic risk scoring without destroying any embryos. They use the risk scores to inform the ordering of their IVF implantations.
One of these couples reasons along the lines of: “If my child has an elevated chance of breast cancer, then it’s better for them to be born later and hence closer to its cure.“
That's funny (but reasonable!). Do they actually plan to implant all of them? I've always wondered if there are ivf clinics (or patients) that are able to factor in the worldview that embryos have moral standing
For one of the two couples, I overheard them saying that they will implant all embryos at an Orchid Health presentation, because it’s important for IVF to be compatible with their religious beliefs.
The other couple is Malcolm and Simone Collins, they just posted about this on X recently.
beginning at fertilization, a human embryo has moral value that's similar in magnitude to a newborn baby […]
Consequently, that should make EAs very reluctant to advocate [embryonic destruction]
I don’t envision any reluctance: most Effective Altruists are hedonic utilitarians and I think would very straight forwardly reject your argument using their moral framework.
Hedonic utilitarians believe that moral value lies in the sum total of pleasure experienced minus pain experienced across time and space.
Early stage embryos (dozen cell structure) don’t feel pain or pleasure so under this moral framework destroying them is not directly immoral. In fact, hedonic utilitarians will reason that under resource constraints, it’s better to selectively choose the embryos that create people likely to have higher hedonic utility.
I disagree with hedonic utilitarianism because people and other beings can have lives that are net negative from a hedonic perspective, but they still find to be meaningful and worthwhile. It would be wrong to tell these people that it would be better that they were never born (they would disagree, even if a negative utilitarian would tell them they are “delusional”). Furthermore, I am even skeptical about whether pain and pleasure are inherently meaningful. After all, these are “arbitrarily” evolved signals from an ancestral environment we no longer inhabit. When we have the technology to edit such signals, should we in fact coerce all people into wire-heading in a pleasure pod?
Haven’t deeply thought through my moral philosophy, but I’m certainly a consequentialist, I highly value “survival”, and I consider “myself” to also be my descendants (e.g. my descendants are my New Game+, and I am a New Game+ for my ancestors).
I was wondering about coercive wire-heading, that seems to be the most obvious issue with hedonic utilitarianism.
There is also the question of what this evolutionary signal is _to_. Consciousness? If causing harm to others is bad in part because of this pain signal, it seems there is _some_ inherent meaning, although I wouldn't count myself as a pro wire-heading hedonic utilitarian either.
Survival for survival's sake is what cancer is though, I feel like this has to bottom out in "meaning" somehow. But maybe that is a hard-problem-of-conscioussness-complete problem.
So here’s the thing. Cancers don’t actually survive for long because they destroy the organism they parasitize. So a perhaps long term view on survival necessitates a “survival, with productivity and flourishing whenever the era/circumstances allow” approach. Only be a cancer if you need to
I think that's reasonable and fair, but I still don't think "survival" is inherently any good either, there has to be a consciousness experiencer that does the surviving.
I don't think most EAs are hedonic utilitarians - most are utilitarian or utilitarian-leaning consequentialists (I think the 2019 survey was the last one to have this data, where just under 70% were utilitarian consequentialists), but I think further qualifying with 'hedonic' would cut that down a lot, at least in the traditional sense where experience is the *only* thing that matters (and even more so in the pleasure/pain sense you talk about below). I'm not aware of any solid data, but my guess would be that less than half of utilitarian or utilitarian-leaning EA consequentialists are pure hedonic utilitarians.
Thanks for your correction, and for pulling up the EA survey stat. Do you know how typical EA utilitarianians add more nuance beyond hedonic utility in this context? Words that come to mind include "flourishing", "personal preferences", and QALYs but not sure if this is how people would typically frame their utility functions.
I think some form of pluralism is fairly common (e.g, hedonistic and preference combined). I also think it's fairly common not to have a specific utility function - you could frame that as being uncertain about which things matter fundamentally and which are instrumental. Some words I'd add might include 'meaning', 'fulfilment', 'self-determination' and the generic 'welfare'. I'm not that sure how typical they are, though; they're based purely on my personal impressions.
Although a lot of EAs are hedonic or hedonic-leaning utilitarians, I consider EA's association with careful analysis to be more central to its identity than its association with hedonic utilitarianism.
For anyone who disagrees, I'm revoking their license to say "critiques of EA are necessarily critiques of individual EAs", because that would be smuggling a lot of philosophical baggage into their definition of EA.
I've never heard of the names Gene Smith or Jonathan Anomaly. Are those people's actual names or is it the title of some blogs? If the former, that's some serious nominative determinism.
I think it's worth mentioning that a very large number of embryos fail to develop even in natural pregnancy. I've seen people argue about the figures, so I'm not sure what the exact percentage is, but it's probably pretty high (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28580126/).
This doesn't directly contradict your point, (embryo selection could still theoretically increase the number of discarded embryos) but it does confuse me. Would moral standing at conception suggest that we should *only* perform IVF and ban regular conception to avoid the associated death? (Given the current popularity of non-IVF conception surely it is the greater cause of embryo death?) Would embryonic personhood then be comparable not with selection, but CRISPR modification?
Right, it's repugnant conclusions like this - that in order to avoid creating naturally doomed embryos, the only ethical choice is invasive and alienating procedures like IVF - that are my strongest reason for not being too serious about embryonic value/personhood/rights. That's crazy.
I can see both sides of the argument otherwise. I suppose I come down in a gray area, where I'm uncomfortable enough with IVF for embryonic personhood reasons (and miserable maternal procedure reasons) that I probably wouldn't do it myself unless I were desperate - but there are plenty of people who are understandably desperate enough that I think the value they gain from it outweighs the small value/chance of personhood of the embryos lost.
Perhaps I've missed something, but I think we should use whichever method has the higher implantation rate (after accounting for quality of embryos, age of the woman, etc.). I would be *very* surprised if that was IVF instead of natural pregnancy, but I'm willing to follow the argument where the data leads it, regardless.
EDIT: You asked about banning one or the other, specifically, so I want to address that explicitly. Assuming that natural pregnancy is more reliable than IVF, I don't necessarily think IVF should be banned, because it's not clear to me that it's worse for a person to (naturally, painlessly) die at two weeks old than to not be born at all. That might sound strange, but I think that denying that preference would imply stringent antinatalism.
The movie Gattaca was a utopia for everybody except the protagonist.
If the protagonist's parents had been responsible like apparently everybody else and had a genetically screened baby, then he wouldn't have had any problems.
The movie focuses on his problem that he can't get the job he wants, but the underlying far bigger problem is that he has a genetic defect which may cause him to drop dead in his thirties.
The solution to "it sucks if some people aren't genetically engineered" isn't "nobody should be genetically engineered", it's "everybody should be genetically engineered".
Where exactly is the conflict? The infant mortality rate also used to be a significant fraction of total infants born, humanity has a poor track record of perceiving moral catastrophes in a timely manner, and embryos are difficult to empathize with.
It doesn't **necessarily** have a conflict, depending on why you pinpoint conception as the origin of life, and if you believe in soul.
If you DO believe in a soul, then it suggests that God values souls so little that He is willing to kill half of them even before the cells begin differentiating. On the one hand, that seems like far, FAR higher level of tolerance for "natural evil" than most religious folks normally have. But if God thinks it's okay, then why shouldn't we?
I also note that you are saying "embryo" rather than "zygote"; I'm not sure if you're aware of the distinction. Briefly, a zygote is still just a mass of undifferentiated cells, which perhaps could be coaxed into differentiating and becoming an embryo (often this process fails, which is why so many concepti are spontaneously aborted). But if you feel a zygote has moral worth, then what about pluripotent stem cells that have been reprogrammed from adult tissue? They seem (to me, at least) to have just as much ability to develop into an embryo and later human (and that's been done with other animals, even if not humans, so this isn't a theoretical objection).
I guess, by analogy, this is like the debate over how many grains of sand it takes to constitute a "pile". Obviously, it's trying to map a bright-line definition onto a fuzzy word, and so there's going to be some ambiguity and resulting disagreement. But from my perspective it looks like you're saying "a single grain is enough to make a pile"... I admit that it has a certain logical coherence if I squint, but it's hard for me to fully understand in terms of any of the other things I'd normally care about.
I think we're in agreement (as per your response to Midi) that "dying" at this stage isn't a great tragedy... but in that case, why not begin assigning moral worth (or calling it a 'pile') at the embryo stage, or implantation, or viability? I remain genuinely curious about what you see as the salient differences.
Q: Hi ChatGPT! I hope your early morning is going well. Can you please tell me how many clearly distinct arguments there are in the interminable abortion debate? I realize that these can be combined into a (roughly) exponential number of stances, but, for _just_ the distinct arguments, how many are there? Many Thanks!
A: There isn’t a canonical count—philosophers and legal theorists carve the terrain differently—but you can compress the debate into ~18 argument families. Most specific positions are combinations of these.
Core families (one-liners):
1. Biological humanity → full moral status. Human life begins at conception; killing it is wrong. (SEP overview.)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
2. Psychological personhood criteria. Rights track capacities (consciousness, interests, rationality); early fetuses lack them. (Tooley.)
JSTOR
3. Potentiality / “future like ours.” What’s wrong with killing is depriving a valuable future; abortion (usually) does that. (Marquis.)
edX
4. Bodily autonomy. Even if the fetus is a person, no one may conscript another’s body (the “violinist” case). (Thomson.)
5. Responsibility for pregnancy. Voluntary risk-taking (sex) can create obligations that limit abortion claims; dissenters dispute this. (Discussion in SEP.)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
6. Self-defense / double effect. Life- or health-saving interventions can be justified even if fetal death is a foreseen side-effect. (Foot; SEP.)
PhilPapers
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
7. Gradualism & thresholds. Moral status may increase with development (heartbeat, brain activity, consciousness, viability). (IEP/SEP surveys.)
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
8. Viability as a legal/moral line. Before viability state power is weaker; after, stronger (contested and technology-dependent). (Roe/Casey/Dobbs.)
10. Privacy/liberty vs. state interests. Liberty (privacy) grounds a right to decide; opponents stress the state’s interest in “potential life.” (Roe/Casey/Dobbs.)
Justia Law
Library of Congress Tile
Supreme Court
11. Public-health / harm-reduction. Restricting access doesn’t end abortion; it makes it less safe and worsens health outcomes. (WHO, CDC, ACOG.)
World Health Organization
CDC
ACOG
12. Safety comparison. Legal abortion (especially early) is far safer than childbirth; policy should reflect that. (ACOG.)
ACOG
13. Moral uncertainty / risk. Given deep disagreement, precaution (for or against abortion) may supply defeasible reasons. (Moller.)
Squarespace
14. Fetal pain. Some argue pain perception grounds later limits; mainstream reviews place the onset ≥24–25 weeks and dispute earlier claims. (RCOG/ACOG.)
15. Disability-rights (“expressivist”) critique. Selective abortion can convey harmful social messages about disabled lives. (Parens & Asch and successors.)
PubMed
16. Sex-selection / demographic harms. Even if abortion is generally permitted, selection for sex is challenged on justice/inequality grounds. (Ethics literature reviews.)
University of Birmingham
17. Socio-economic consequences. Denial of wanted abortion increases financial distress and harms health; access improves life outcomes. (Turnaway Study, NBER.)
NBER
ANSIRH
18. Paternal interests & parental obligations. Disputes over the moral/legal claims of putative fathers and over duties to gestate/adopt-out rather than abort. (Surveyed in SEP.)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
If you like, I can map these into a matrix showing how different policy packages (e.g., “early liberal, late restrictive,” “health-only exceptions,” etc.) combine subsets of these arguments.
I don't think this was helpful. I wasn't talking about abortion; I was talking about a specific form of IVF. Although they share some philosophical considerations, the issues are substantially different.
Even if they were very similar, copy-pasting from ChatGPT with no context and no apparent attempt to format your answer is spammy.
Many Thanks! I disagree. I think most of the downstream thread (thread tree?) is substantially identical to the interminable abortion debate. Yes, there are considerations which are unique to embryo selection, but a lot of the comments don't address these considerations. The listing of the old arguments gives a compact form in which people can see:
- Whether their arguments introduce anything new or not
- Whether they wish to simply endorse or oppose one or more of the existing arguments
- Whether they have overlooked one of the old arguments that they want to endorse or oppose
Don't humans acquire moral value when we believe they do? Birth seems more convenient than conception to me and either are tenable and consistent given they are not aware and do not suffer.
Your first point sounds like a particularly naive or extreme form of moral relativism. What's the relevant scale for "we"? Also, is there really nothing so abhorrent that it is morally wrong, regardless of what we believe about it?
Your second point seems to deny that (e.g.) a 30-week-old fetus is not conscious or capable of suffering, which is badly wrong. The birth canal does not bestow consciousness.
I'm sorry if I've misunderstood either of your points--I've spent a lot of time responding to comments today, so I might not be reading yours with a clear mind.
How people choose to use the word morality is up to their desires and preferences and successful communication will rely on intersubjective agreement about when to deploy moral terms. You can of course define morality as something not dependent on human beliefs but that definition itself will rely on human beliefs.
Three possible objections I can think of that you don't discuss:
1. You mention how IVF is expensive and very unpleasant, but it might also just have negative effects on the embryo by itself (I know zeta_globin on Twitter is always banging on about this). If we're lucky the selection might yield a net improvement? I don't know, I don't really have enough knowledge here to make this argument or know how strong it is, but I've seen it out there so I thought I should mention it.
2. This is another argument I'm stealing from *someone*, but I don't know who (I remember asking in the comments here once and someone said it was the Unabomber, but I could not in fact find it in the Unabomber manifesto). So far it doesn't sound like this is allowing any sort of selection on personality traits (unless one considers IQ a personality trait). I'm mildly worried about the possibility of selection for agreeableness. That is, I'm worried that parents might select for agreeableness in the hopes of having an easier-to-raise kid, but that this occurring on a large scale might lead to increased conformism that holds back humanity. (Though selection on some other personality traits sounds pretty nice -- who doesn't want lower neuroticism or higher conscientiousness?) (I guess arguably this is covered under the "Selection" category, but it's a little different, I think, in that it's not purely individual.)
3. I can't find it at the moment, and this is even more arguably already covered under the "Selection" category, but I remember an old blog post by Ozy about the possibility of an even more extreme form of the downsides under "Selection" -- i.e., that awful parents might completely disregard their child's welfare in their selection (think of what's happened to certain dog breeds, bred for aesthetics). Like, abusive parents exist, so! Not sure how great that is as an argument because it strikes me as perhaps a bit too "criminals use cars", but thought it was worth mentioning (can anyone find the post? For some reason I can't find it right now!).
Yes, #3 is a good point -- if this becomes generally used/accepted (and hopefully not banned), laws around it will (hopefully) be made to cover this sort of thing.
For #2 that is a counterbalancing factor, but if you get clustering then maybe there's a problem? OTOH, selection on higher IQ -- which is generally desirable -- would probably do a bit to mitigate that...
Natural forms of #3 are, to my knowledge, not illegal currently: AFAIK you are fully within your legal rights to have a child even if you know they will (or likely will) have a serious disability or fatal disease. For example, the couple in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/health/pompe-disease-treatment.html
I was playing with the Herasight widget for various conditions (plus IQ), and it tells me the expected outcomes for 5, 10, or 20 embryos estimated by their genetic predictors. But I don't know what the implications of these values are. Does this imply they can select the best out of 5, 10, or 20 embryos to obtain the lowest liability (R-squared for risk variance) for that condition? I assume that's what they're claiming, but without a comparison of liability scores between the embryo counts. If not, what are they trying to prove with this widget.
They're not claiming that they can select the best with certainty, they're making a probabilistic claim that they'll do, on average, that much better than average.
If you haven't given them a real set of embryos, then they're simulating embryos with a normal distribution. For example, if two IQ 100 people marry each other, then on average their children will center around IQ 100 with some variance. I don't know exactly what that variance is, but they do and they've calculated it. Maybe on average, five embryos will range from 90 - 110. So if they could always choose perfectly, they could pick the 110 one and get you 10 points above average. But since they can't choose perfectly, they only expect to get you 5 points above average.
That's what I would have expected. But the widget tells me that with 20 embryos from 2 European parents whose IQs are 100, we can expect their child's IQ to be plus or minus half a standard deviation above or below the parents. The kid could have an IQ of between 93 and 108. I don't think they're claiming that, but somebody needs to talk to marketing about improving their value proposition. ;-)
I was playing with their widget. It displays the values of the expected outcomes for 5, 10, or 20 embryos estimated by their genetic predictors. I presume they're claiming they can select the best of 5, 10, or 20 embryos—but it doesn't give me a readout of liability scores. So I can't really make a risk/benefit calculation. Am I missing something obvious here?
Another (tongue in cheek) objection. Your parents will be absolute morons compared to you at some point. You’ll be a mopey 14 year old screaming at your parents for not making obvious stock market picks and running their own companies.
On average, smart parents' children will be less smart than they are, because of regression to the mean. Currently, I think this technology just helps you tread water. I agree that this will be true in 10 or 20 years when the technology is much better.
150 IQ is 3.3 SD above the mean. From an eyeball at a statistical table, 1 in 2000 people are this smart or smarter. And several of them may be reading this blog :)
We need to distinguish between *having* 150 IQ and *measuring* it.
If 150 IQ is 1 in 2000, then obviously there are many people who have it. They are rare in the population, to the degree that many people probably never met one of them in person. But they may be concentrated in some places, for example some universities, so it wouldn't be impossible to know many of them.
How to make an IQ test that reliably distinguishes between e.g. 140 IQ and 150 IQ, that is a different question, and maybe there is no such test yet, because it would be too expensive to make it. To test the levels at "1 in 2000", you would need maybe 20 000 test subjects (for each age group!) to make it statistically valid, and maybe no one has spent enough money to actually do it.
So I'd say that there are many people with IQ 150+ out there, but in practice they are hard to distinguish from people with IQ 140 of which there are many more.
I'm not sure how you might have come to that understanding. As other commenters noted, just assuming a mean/std of 100/16 (which is extremely reasonable, since the test is normed that way by design) puts 1 in 1000 people at 150+ (meaning 300,000 in the USA alone).
But in addition to that, there are multiple studies confirming at least the _existence_ of some people scoring that high. Eg Harmon 1961 collected scores for 80% of PhDs awarded in 1958, and found a mean of 130 for physicists; it's not hard to imagine that at least some of them were 1.3 SD over that mean. Roe 1953 administered tests directly, and found multiple people over 150.
Did you mean some other number, by chance? The original Stanford-Binet test capped out at around 170, and certainly the s.e.m. is so high at that point that it's extremely difficult to compare two individuals in that range _with each other_ (e.g. Terrance Tao vs Christopher Hirata). But I think it's pretty obvious that at least some people genuinely score that high, and have produced work to match it.
Typically children of this sort are much more interesting in doing things in their own lives rather than controlling what they do with their parents lives. They're building full-flow 2 stage model rockets with landing capability rather than crying to their parents that they aren't supermen.
Teenagers feel this way about their parents regardless of the real relationship between their levels of intelligence, it'll be nice for them to actually be right about being smarter for a change.
A not-at-all joking response: There will always come a point at which your parents are morons compared to you, unless one of you dies first. Age and senescence come for us all (so far) and cognitive ability is not spared.
The main thing I'm hoping for from this research is that it gets us closer to adult genome editing. It'll be really awkward if I'm in my 40s and there are 10 year olds smarter than me (Assuming AGI doesn't happen by then and render genetics completely moot).
If we're really concerned about improving our future children's genes, it's worth noting that compared to IVF and embryo selection choosing a partner with strong genetic traits (e.g. intelligence, health, height) would have a far larger impact.
The genetic variation between potential partners is much wider than the small variation among embryos from the same couple. So if you believe improving genetic outcomes is a moral good, does choosing a partner for love or chemistry over heritable traits amount to prioritizing our own happiness over our future child's potential?
I feel like some people already do this! Prioritizing someone hot/smart/healthy/wealthy over other people that might be nicer to you seems like a commonly discussed phenomenon
When i was dating many of my peers got genetic testing to screen for heritable disease that they might be a carrier for. There was a service that saved the results and you could then check potential partners for the same recessive disease. It would tell if you are both carriers but not what specific disease.
I think those traits are typically considered for their first-order effects on the relationship, or *maybe* for their relevance for providing during the reproductive years, not for their genetic effects on the offspring.
I don't think choosing partners for the genetic traits we want our kids to have is at all a commonly discussed phenomenon.
I sure never thought about it. Both of my serious relationships were with people who had siblings with relatively common heritable disorders. I was basically like "huh weird, I guess that's cool/sucks," and not once did it cross my mind that it could affect my potential kids.
Even less data on multi-racial / mixed-race genomes. Multi-racial couples are out of distribution for these machine learning models and plausibly will get the least value from these embyronic screening services.
We don't currently understand much about genetic interactions, either because they rarely happen or because our current tools aren't good enough to detect them. Since embryo selection can only use the genetics we understand, interactions aren't relevant here, and predicting mixed race couples works fine using what we know about the component races.
So for example, on Herasight's calculator, an Asian couple with five embryos can gain 4.1 IQ points, a white couple can gain 5.3 IQ points, and a mixed white-Asian couple can gain 4.8 IQ points - right in between.
And he's free to ban you for being a stupid jerk. My argument for the assertion that you are a stupid jerk is that you didn't provide arguments for your assertion, refused to do so when he asked you to, and said you don't care about his preferences.
Opinions still have an internal logic to them, unless you are claiming to have arrived at yours by rolling dice. If you hope to convince people to adopt yours, you will generally need to engage with that internal logic. For example, you could say *why* you think this will lead to "a very troubling future", or what you think will be troubling about it.
As it happens, I *have* read Brave New World, but to my recollection it objects to nonintellectual hedonism and the creation of a low-intelligence underclass. If you also object to creating healthier, more intelligent people, and think Brave New World is criticising that goal, them I think you have misread the text.
The creation of a high-intelligence upperclass implies the creation of a low-intelligence underclass, even if no active measures are taken towards the latter. Implying it's an intentional, active process may be a POSIWID fallacy because nobody is proposing to bathe embryos in an alcoholic solution or whatever exact mechanism BNW offered, but the overall result is bound to happen anyway.
It turns humans into products. It creates rigid castes divided by intelligence level. It eliminates family structure. It’s a horrifying dystopian world that we are running to as fast as we can.
You're missing the point. People who need to use IVF because they cannot naturally conceive a baby will of course seek to have a healthy child if possible. But that's not what this whole piece is about: It is about people deciding to put a woman through the painful and difficult IVF process just so they can get an athletic kid with blue eyes or whatever.
It's really disingenuous to pretend trying to have a healthy child free of a terrible disease is the same thing as choosing a kid who is tall.
And to use IVF tech when there's no infertility problem is ethically questionable.
There are dozens of people with your opinion participating in the conversation here. Nobody cares that you have this opinion, but this space is used for discussion. The reaction you're getting is not because anyone disagrees with you or feels you shouldn't be allowed a voice, but because you're treating this like a facebook post. You can think and say a lot more here than most other places; you're just expected to contribute signal, not meaningless noise.
but you still didn't answer the question... if you don't support a woman's right to choose what goes into her body, just say so.
(in case it's not clear, this is, indeed, a rhetorical device, pitting one purported value against another in an attempt to get you to make a coherent argument, rather than just being enraged)
An issue that I have yet to see addressed well enough is how sure are we that there is no added developmental risk from the procedure itself that would counterweight the benefits, especially when the benefits are "add an expected 4 IQ points" rather than "not have CF". The risks I'm thinking are mostly:
1) Stress to the embryo from the sampling, either in inducing developmental mispatterning (more likely) or de novo mutations
2) Stress to the embryo and the mother from the IVF (development/mutations for the embryo, hormonal and immune signaling mess for the mom), if comparing against in vivo fertilization
There just seem to be so many risks there that even if each one is very tiny change in odds because doctors optimized it excellently, they should add up to more than 4 IQ points.
Polygenic selection isn’t just a tweak to medicine or parenting. It’s a decision about who gets to exist, and why. But this conversation keeps retreading familiar grooves without confronting the ontological vertigo this new technology introduces.
We’re not choosing a school or a tutor; we’re choosing which possible person becomes our child. That crosses a metaphysical threshold. Potential humans are now compared probabilistically—not for life or death, but for entrance into life itself. And this comparison is based on traits that increasingly resemble KPIs: IQ, BMI, schizophrenia risk, even eye color. That's person-as-product, full stop.
We need plainer language for what’s happening. The core ethical shift isn’t “screening embryos” or “preventing disease.” It’s that the value of a life becomes a function of its forecasted traits. And you know once that logic takes hold, it won’t stay confined to embryos.
The risk isn't Gattaca-style coercion. I'm more worried about soft cultural convergence. No laws required. Just dashboards, rankings, and best practices. And because it feels like choice, not imposition, no one will notice the narrowing until it’s a fait accompli.
Maybe this tech does increase aggregate well-being. But it also reshapes the moral substrate beneath our choices. When you start selecting children the way you select college applicants, your deciding what kind of soul you think is worth betting on.
Is this also true when you take prenatal vitamins to prevent spinal deformity? Isn't that selecting for children who don't have spinal deformity over those who do? Or that the value of a life without spinal deformity is more than one with it? Should we ban prenatal vitamins?
I think there’s a category error here. Taking prenatal vitamins supports the development of a child who already exists. Polygenic selection chooses which possible child gets to exist at all. The former is about nurturing; the latter is about filtering.
Once we’re filtering not for catastrophic disease, but for probabilistic forecasts of intelligence, temperament, or BMI, we’ve crossed from medicine into metaphysics -- defining what kinds of human potential are “worthwhile.” That ain't just banning vitamins.
What happens when the logic of actuarial triage becomes our primary mode of making people?
What you call "catastrophic disease" is also a value judgement. It's a very common value, but saying it's better for a child not to have a spinal deformity is just as much a decision about what kind of lives should be lived as selecting based on predicted IQ.
Not all value judgments are equally loaded. Shifting from healing a child to curating one begins to apply a logic of comparative worth to potential lives. If we’re going to do that, we should at least be honest about what it is.
I'm not sure what you mean by "loaded", but keeping your child from being born with a spinal deformity is absolutely applying a logic of comparative worth to potential lives. At the time you make the decision both lives (with spinal deformity and without) are merely potentials, and your decisions change their relative likelihood of being realised. People act on this because they think the life without the deformity is better than the life with.
Yes, choosing to avoid spinal deformity involves a value judgment. But there's a difference between reducing the risk of profound suffering and optimizing for predicted traits like IQ or BMI. One stems from a widely shared ethic of care; the other starts to encode comparative desirability into existence itself.
That’s what I mean by "loaded": some judgments operate within a shared moral horizon. Others begin to redraw the boundaries of which potential lives are seen as worth bringing into the world.
I don’t think the argument is that the lives of children with spinal deformities are worth less than other children. I think it’s that it would be preferable to live in a world where children with spinal deformities can receive appropriate treatment and accommodation, as opposed to a world where those children simply do not exist.
This tech proposes to “solve” a “problem” by engineering a situation where the “problem” doesn’t exist. That’s fine for some things, but I don’t think it’s crazy to get uneasy when the “things” in question are people.
What’s weird is that this tech simply lets parents choose one randomly generated embryo over another. If we assume there’s no a priori reason to choose one over the other, it doesn’t seem crazy to let the parents’ preferences break the tie. And right now, these preferences are things like “maximize the chance of a pregnancy that’s successful and safe for the mom” and “minimize the expected health care costs over a lifetime”. Not unreasonable!
I do think parents could be a little more honest with themselves about how much these choices are being made for their own sake, rather than their prospective child’s. It’s fine not to want to go through the gauntlet of raising a kid with a rare genetic disorder: I image it’s a huge emotional and financial weight. But probably don’t say the choice is for the child’s sake, because it’s not hard to see how that could shade into saying it’s best for such children not to exist at all.
In my opinion everything gets way more fraught if you start designing embryos from scratch. That’s not what this tech does, so I’m mostly agnostic about it. But I do get worried about slippery slopes, because humans haven’t had the greatest track record in this domain.
>I think it’s that it would be preferable to live in a world where children with spinal deformities can receive appropriate treatment and accommodation, as opposed to a world where those children simply do not exist.
FWIW, I have the opposite preference. Treatment and accommodation have their limits.
Indeed, there is a spectrum of conditions along which I think reasonable people can have differing preferences. A spinal deformity is perhaps not the most interesting example for considering the ethical consequences of this tech, due to the nature of the associated treatments/accommodations. But what about deafness? Or ADHD? Or left-handedness?
(To be clear, I’m not trying to play “gotcha” here, I’m just trying my best to pinpoint the crux of the disagreement on this topic.)
( FWIW, I, personally, happen to be childfree and long past my potential reproductive years, so I don't actually have a dog in this fight... )
I think the best public policy course of action is to leave these decisions up to the prospective parents. As you said
>Indeed, there is a spectrum of conditions along which I think reasonable people can have differing preferences.
Hopefully, the parents have their child's best interests at heart, and will weigh all the possible factors, from catastrophic ones like severe spina bifida to near-neutral ones like left-handedness, in that light. If they _don't_ , the child is screwed anyway, and there is very little that the State can do to remedy the situation. ( Yeah, child protection services exists - and regularly screws up in both directions. )
P.S. I’m trying to square how the basic refusal to tie a person’s worth to forecasted ability, as you argued in The Parable of Talents, can sit alongside the idea of selecting embryos for predicted performance. Do you still believe what you wrote in 2015, and if you do, how are you thinking about that in light of your more recent posts on embryo screening? The tones just feel really different.
The point of Parable of Talents wasn't "there is no sense in which being talented is better than being untalented". It's that can still be happy / proud of yourself / etc regardless of your level of talent.
By analogy, consider money. It's totally consistent to assert both:
-- Money isn't everything, poor people can still be happy and proud of their accomplishments, you don't have to feel bad for not being a billionaire.
-- It's good to have good economic policy so that fewer people are poor.
I reread Parable yesterday. It wasn’t just about self-worth in the face of uneven talent; it also made the case that being differently talented, or even not especially talented at all, can still have value. You leaned on comparative advantage. You even imagined having an IQ of 70 and still finding a way to contribute. But that only works if there’s real diversity of traits in the world.
This new technology seems to cut against that. If we start selecting for the same narrow set of traits -- IQ, low neuroticism, conscientiousness --- we’re shrinking the range of who gets born.
Comparative advantage breaks down. And so does the moral logic of Parable, doesn’t it?
Comparative advantage isn't about diversity of traits. Even if someone is better than I am in every way, I can still have a comparative advantage relative to them, as long as there are at least two traits.
For example, if I am mediocre at math and writing, and you are mediocre at math but good at writing, then my comparative advantage over you is in math, even though I am no better at math than you are.
Even if I am mediocre at math and writing, and you are good at math and great at writing, I still have a comparative advantage over you in math (even though you have an absolute advantage over me).
Fair, comparative advantage doesn’t require diversity of absolute abilities. But I wasn’t really making a Ricardian point. I meant something broader.
If cultural and technological pressure pushes us to select for the same tight cluster of traits -- IQ, low neuroticism, etc. -- we narrow the range of human temperament and aptitude we’re willing to bring into the world. That might preserve comparative advantage in the technical sense, but we lose the kind of asymmetry that makes space for different kinds of lives to feel meaningful.
So even if the math holds, I’m not sure the moral or psychological ecology does.
Doesn't that logic fall apart when you start getting into more extreme cases? Your average human is simply more capable in every single way than, say, a chimpanzee. I'm pretty sure the human could even win in a fight if they trained hard enough. So what "comparative advantage" does the chimpanzee have? They are simply objectively worse in every way.
Don't beat around the bush here. You are inherently making value judgements by promoting the elimination of specific traits and the enhancements of others. That doesn't need to be a bad thing, mind you. Ask yourself: why do you want your child to have these specific traits in the first place?
"And you know once that logic takes hold, it won’t stay confined to embryos."
Why should it? It's factually correct. This is the logic used by the economic system which has produced prosperity unimaginable for the vast majority of human history.
Market logic has produced staggering material gains. It’s also optimized away biodiversity, cultural memory, and non-commercial forms of meaning. Useful doesn’t mean neutral. When that same logic starts governing which kinds of people get to exist, we’re not just scaling efficiency; we’re rewriting the criteria for entrance into life.
If you think the logic that brought you cheaper iPhones should also dictate the selection of human souls, that’s…a position. But let’s not pretend nothing changed.
In any case, the point wasn’t that the logic is flawed. The point was: once it’s normalized at the level of reproduction, it will reshape what we mean by a “worthwhile” human being.
True, what counts as a “worthwhile” human has always been contested and evolving, which is precisely why we should be alert when a new mechanism emerges that may lock in a narrower definition under the banner of optimization.
As for a “positive vision”: I don’t want to halt innovation, and I’m not against reducing suffering or helping parents make informed decisions. But we need to preserve a moral space where unpredictable, unoptimized, even “low-probability” human lives are seen as fully valid -- not just tolerated, but valued. In other words: a future where technology supports life, rather than presorts it.
That will require drawing some philosophical lines before the dashboards fill in automatically.
>which is precisely why we should be alert when a new mechanism emerges that may lock in a narrower definition under the banner of optimization
Well, there are few stronger taboos in the modern world than against "eugenics", so I very much doubt that if this manages to squeak through it would be through lack of alertness.
>That will require drawing some philosophical lines before the dashboards fill in automatically.
Philosophy's track record doesn't inspire much confidence in any lines it would produce, but of course that has never stopped philosophers.
The taboo against “eugenics” exists -- mostly in name. What we’re watching now is its rebranding as choice, optimization, and personal empowerment. Norms don’t tend to collapse through brute force, but through a gradual shift in what feels reasonable.
If your view is that ethics can’t help and vigilance doesn’t matter, then there’s nothing to discuss. That’s a shrug, not a position.
Do you disagree with the factual claim that capitalism produced some unprecedented prosperity (while e.g. the glorious Soviet Union had a problem to feed its citizens), or do you just think it is too gauche to say it in public?
I disagree with the laughably simplistic idea that prosperity can be attributed directly to the economic system it happens under and that the only thing going on during the cold war was capitalism vs communism being weighed objectively for effectiveness, yes.
I mean you already can make a decision about the characteristics of your baby that goes much further than polygenic selection: By selecting your partner out of 50% of the world's population. By choosing to have a child with one person, you deny existence to all the babies that could have been born had you chosen someone else. Of course partner choice is probably rarely made just based on gene-based traits one wants to have in one's offspring, but it certainly plays a role.
However I can see where you're coming from. One parallel might be pets, e.g. dogs: Anyone can, and most do, choose a dog breed they like from a wide range available. And I guess dog owners are really happy with that and love their dog and want it to be happy and healthy, nothing wrong with that. However, the problems start when dog owners have such a strong preference in characterisics that they choose breeds that have well known health problems, like french bulldogs or whatever. There the characteristics that the owners like trump the health concerns of the dog.
What if deaf parents lived happily in a deaf community, and select the one embryo out of five that is also deaf, so their child can experience life as they do? Would that be morally right, as most people would percieve deafness as a severe disadvantage in life? Or if the parents really, really want a blue-eyed baby, and choose that one blue-eyed embryo despite a 50% chance of cancer? Also looking at the parents that send their kids to those extreme child beauty pageants, strong guardrails will probably be have to be implemented should this tech get any further, to prevent a lot of suffering in those edge cases.
Your buffet of analogies sidesteps the categorical difference between influencing an existing person’s life and choosing which possible person gets to exist based on ranked traits.
Yes, selection happens at every level of reproduction, partner choice included. But polygenic selection crosses a new threshold by ranking potential humans by algorithmic desirability before they’ve been allowed to exist.
This has now become an existential decision based on probabilistic predictions of cognitive, behavioral, and physical profiles. Let’s at least call it what it is, rather than normalizing it through analogies that don’t fit. We're not choosing a dog breed.
> But polygenic selection crosses a new threshold by ranking potential humans by algorithmic desirability before they’ve been allowed to exist.
Do you mean polygenic selection would lead to the single alogrithm that gets applied to all humans, and only those with the maximum number of points would be allowed to exist? It's the parents who make the choice, and they do so based on their own personality and preferences. They get presented with a table of x embryos vs y probabilities of characteristics from disease to IQ, and make a choice based on their perferences. I'd say it's very much like selecting a dog breed.
The parents make the choice, but the fact that it's individual choice doesn’t negate the nature of the decision being made.
We're no longer just nurturing a child or even choosing to conceive at a particular time. We're comparing multiple potential humans based on statistical forecasts and deciding which one gets to exist -- not based on catastrophic disease, but on probabilistic desirability across a range of traits. That’s fundamentally new.
It may feel like choosing a dog breed, but dogs aren’t people. They’re not moral agents. They’re not asked to find meaning in lives they were selected into based on marginally higher predicted IQ or lower BMI.
So no, I don’t think “it's just like picking a dog breed” holds up once you follow the implications through. It’s a flattening analogy that deflects from the deeper shift underway: from accepting the unpredictability of human life to curating it in advance based on optimized projections.
Did I misunderstand your objection? Vaccination is a decision which influences an existing child.
Personally I think it's morally objectionable to deny a child vaccination because the possible outcome is one which I would call worse, even though the parents would call it better. My understanding is that in your framework, that would be okay (I'm pretty sure I disagree with that, but maybe you have a point I haven't considered).
But I certainly don't share this intuition that excluding one embryo amongst 10 is any worse of an intervention than vaccination.
I guess I can understand the reservations around genetic diversity, and I can understand the reservations for folks who believe that life begins at conception, but your reservation seems to be based on personal outrage, and I'm not sure where it's coming from.
Appreciate the clarifying effort. But no, I’m not defending MMR refusal. I flagged your example as a category error because it conflates influencing an existing child’s health (via action or omission) with choosing which potential child gets to exist in the first place.
My concern isn’t rooted in “life begins at conception” theology, or in squeamishness about medical influence. It’s in the shift from nurturing unpredictable lives to selecting among predicted ones based on ranked desirability.
Vaccination aims to protect a child already in the world. Polygenic selection, at scale, begins to define what kinds of humans are worth bringing into it. That may not feel morally weightier to you, but to me it marks a foundational change in how we relate to human life: not just caring for it, but pre-sorting it.
Except that "ranking potential humans by algorithmic desirability before they’ve been allowed to exist," does not meaningfully differ from "partner choice based on gene-based traits one wants to have in one's offspring." They're different phrases that mean the same thing: deciding beforehand what kind of children you want.
We are, in fact, choosing our 'breed' of offspring every time we decide to have children with one person and not another. We don't always know what that strain will produce, but we definitely make inferences on the basis of pre-existing traits.
The reason we currently accept the unpredictability of human life is because we cannot predict it, not because it should be fundamentally unpredictable in order to remain human. However objectionable you may find the mechanism, a change in kind has not taken place - only one of degree.
A more pertinent question would be whether we have the right to deny people the foreknowledge of genetic information, if it could be used to improve their children's lives. I don't think we do, but I'd be interested to hear your take.
Choosing a partner reflects implicit preferences, including genetic ones, but that’s not the same as explicitly ranking embryos by predicted traits and selecting accordingly. One is inference under uncertainty, the other is filtration by forecast. That’s not just a shift in degree. It’s a shift in kind.
I don’t object to foreknowledge, but to what happens when it’s used to filter human lives before they begin. The right to know doesn’t automatically imply the right to act on that knowledge in ways that redefine who gets to exist.
But people absolutely DO rank their partners on the basis of genetically-transmitted traits, with predictable outcomes for children. Tall, smart, blue eyes, etc. A shift from uncertain conditions to more certain ones is not a shift in kind, because in either case we try to make the same selections in advance.
We act on limited knowledge to redefine who gets to exist every day. The alternative is refusing screening for horrible congenital diseases because we believe that a random affliction is more moral than a conscious prevention, or actively acting against our own trait preferences for sexual partners. That's not a reality I'm eager to indulge.
When you fall in love, or even just choose a partner, you’re not running a regression on their genome. You’re drawn to a person, a whole person, whose traits emerge through culture, chance, hardship, and a lifetime of adaptation. If you hope your future child inherits their curiosity, resilience, or kindness, that’s not “ranking potential humans.” That’s loving someone and hoping what you love continues.
Embryo screening is something else entirely. It takes a cluster of possible humans and scores them on a grid of forecasted traits—IQ, BMI, mental health risk, even “educational attainment” -- and selects accordingly. That’s not preference under uncertainty. That’s predictive exclusion.
Let’s call it what it is: a shift from attraction to optimization, from courtship to computation. It doesn’t just fine-tune a familiar process; it industrializes the logic of better and worse humans.
And yes, it will change us. The tools we use to make people will reshape what we expect from them and what we think counts as a “good” life. If you think that’s just a difference in degree, I don’t think you’ve really looked.
This reads as pure nonsense to me even as someone who has misgivings about this. If you jerk off one additional time before impregnating your wife you're choosing not to let certain "potential humans" be born based on no useful criteria at all. There cannot be value to "potential humans" without ending up with completely ridiculous moral conclusions. Humans who never got past being a clump of cells are not and never were people, and have no moral value.
Libertarian eugenics can create serious issues just like authoritarian eugenics is almost certain to, but the issues arise from increased inequality and unforeseen consequences from removing certain parts of genetic diversity.
The point isn’t that every potential human has moral status. It’s that the criteria we use to decide which potential humans become actual ones reflect and gradually reshape our values.
Jerking off doesn’t involve a value-laden decision between ranked embryos scored on predicted IQ, BMI, or psychiatric risk. Polygenic selection does. The novelty isn’t selection per se -- it’s the filtration of future lives through actuarial models of desirability.
You don’t need to believe embryos have full moral status to see that shifting our selection logic from randomness or love to statistical optimization exerts long-term pressure on social norms, parental expectations, and even our idea of what counts as a full human life. The stakes aren’t just biological. They’re civilizational.
I think I might have been misled by your framing. Even in this post, talking about it in terms of "potential humans" and "future lives" makes it sound like you're advocating on behalf of imaginary people rather than focusing on the potential negative social impacts (on real people) of a society that is willing to engage in eugenics, which seems to be your actual point.
Yeah, I'm not concerned that certain hypothetical people won’t exist but that we’re beginning to encode narrow, quantifiable definitions of value into the act of creation itself. And to normalize that encoding as rational, desirable, even virtuous.
I think I agree that the immediate first-order benefits of IVF embryo selection (and by extension the type of more targeted gene editing discussed in the linked post by Gene Smith) are likely to be extremely positive, considering how much low-hanging fruit there is, even if considering only the disease risk reduction.
Still, I find myself more concerned about the long-term consequences. Gene's post on LW makes an analogy to the development of the modern broiler chicken, which seems to me more alarming than he lets on. Inevitably, if these techniques develop as Scott projects, it will lead to a narrowing of the human gene pool over time (though probably not to a single point, as I imagine there would be some clusters of coordinated traits that are favorable among different values systems).
Slightly closer to home, I look at my purebred yellow Labradors. Fantastic companion animals, and certainly not the least practical breed out there. But I cannot imagine a population of labs surviving in the wild under more adverse conditions. How many generations of hardcore gene selection does it take until we're the same? How robust is that population (to X-risks) compared to the current, naturally-selected order?
Reading some of those objections I'm reminded of that old tagline from Gattaca "There is no gene for the human spirit." A sentiment to which we can now reply "No, but there's probably about 10 thousand SNPs correlated with it."
I've never really understood the objection that with the development of AI there's no point in trying to improve human abilities. Setting aside the fact that I'm very much not convinced that AI is just around the corner, even if it is I still see the value in humans. A diversity of minds has the same benefits as a diverse ecosystem, each organisms filling and exploiting its niche. It would be incredibly short-sighted of us to neglect the development of different mindtypes.
While there's lots to get to, I'm disappointed you didn't even brush up against my main ethical concern about this technology, which is diversity. No, not the race thing -- I mean real diversity. I like living in a world full of vastly different people, with different body types, different tempers and intellects, different tastes in ice cream. A democratization of designer-babies would bring with it a homogenization of the human race towards a consensus 'optimal' form, and that just creeps me the hell out, like a lower-rate version of tiling the universe with paperclips. The natural endpoint of this technology seems to be a world populated entirely with tall, mathy, conventionally handsome, allistic, sociable people. Depending on the way society's blowing they'll either all be heterosexual, or all bisexual. By god, what a waste of a planet.
When I imagine a glorious transhumanist deep utopia, it looks more like Wonderland than Heaven; it's a world like the Culture; it's a world of endless variety, where hardly any two humans have the same skin color and the person next to you on the bus might not even have the same package of *senses*. Granted, modulo AGI which gives adult humans the ability to shapeshift, this sort of technology would be necessary to get something like that. But I don't think the humanity of 2025 can be trusted with it yet. If this goes big before something else changes the course of destiny, I think it's all too likely we'll erase all the interesting but unconventional or stigmatised variations, the left-handedness and the autism and the obligate monosexuality and the unibrows, from the genome long before we grow wise and realise how stultifyingly *boring* it's all become now that everyone is a sporty Von Neumann.
And there's another, related fear. I don't want to go extinct. Maybe *you* want your kids to be smarter than you, but I don't, particularly. There are simple pleasures I wish I could enjoy that bore me to death, because my mind won't sit still; jokes I don't laugh at because I can see the punchline coming a mile away. And sure, I don't know the thrill of winning a high-level chess game against a grandmaster; but that's just it. It's all a treadmill. I don't want our supergenius children to find all our jokes boring, our music simplistic and our novels obvious. I want children to whom we can pass our culture on into eternity; children we can laugh with. Not children to whom everything that defines who we are will look like Dora the Explorer. I think it would do them, and us, a great disservice.
> I like living in a world full of vastly different people, with different body types, different tempers and intellects, different tastes in ice cream. A democratization of designer-babies would bring with it a homogenization of the human race towards a consensus 'optimal' form, and that just creeps me the hell out, like a lower-rate version of tiling the universe with paperclips.
Thank you! I completely agree. There are many traits that probably aren’t “optimal” for maximizing socio-economic status or whatever, but society needs some % of them to thrive long-term. Tortured poets, revolutionaries, etc. Anything that reduces genetic diversity risks “optimizing” these people away. (I’m a diagnosed autist, and I don’t want to “optimize” *me* away!)
How do these concerns not apply equally to giving babies prenatal vitamins?
You're going from a more diverse state (some babies born with deformities from lack of vitamins, some healthy) to a less diverse state (all babies born healthy). And if you have a minor vitamin deficiency, then moving all kids to the no-minor-vitamin-deficiency state is driving "your type" extinct.
I think I just decide that diversity in whether people have deformities and diseases isn't the kind of diversity I care about. I care about the kind of diversity where some people are Einstein and some are Taylor Swift and some are MLK. But all of those are healthy, high-IQ people who didn't die of spina bifida at age 4.
And how, exactly, do you intend to have a glorious transhumanist future where everyone is a different type without any genetic technologies? I'm actually more concerned about this than excited - I worry at some point they'll come up with a predictor for extraversion, and half of parents will select in favor and half against, and then things will get pretty weird.
My main answer is that this technology at its current level of efficacy/cost isn't enough to cause broad social changes. And if you extend it outward until it is, we're already in the glorious transhumanist future (or at most one generation away from it, after the hyperselected people grow up and invent transhuman technologies) and we'll pass off the problem to them.
I still think the equation of raising IQ with curing obvious awful diseases is fallacious. It's not obvious to me that, past a certain threshold enabling e.g. literacy, smarter people's lives are better or more worth living; you're just moving the hedonistic treadmill around, while reducing the variety of minds that exist.
I also want to stress that my two points are separate, even if they come from similar places, and that my concern about "my type going extinct" was specifically cerebral (i.e. "I want there to always be people who think sufficiently like me to appreciate the same kind of art I liked and created"), as distinct from my worry about from the overall loss of variety incurred by erasing pattern baldness or whatever.
Relatedly, you seem to have side-stepped the risk of traits which are not objectively harmful, but are socially stigmatized, being selected against. It's one thing to be maximally spicy and say "we shouldn't select dwarfism and deafness out of existence", but my worries apply even without that sort of thing. e.g. unibrows, (non-debilitating) autism, etc. There are plenty of idiosyncrasies that are not deformities or disabilities, but which parents, for various, shallow reasons, might disproportionately choose against passing on.
> And how, exactly, do you intend to have a glorious transhumanist future where everyone is a different type without any genetic technologies?
I did raise that very point in the first post. You're right, of course. It's just that, like that *other* technology that could bring about a glorious transhumanist future, it could ruin the world as much as it could save it, and I'm not sure current humans are wise enough to use it well yet. If embryo selection remains the *only* transhuman tech for the foreseeable future, I don't think "well, that'll be our transhuman children's problem, they've got this" is a get-out-of-jail-free card. I wouldn't particularly expect the hyperselected transhumans to be wiser just because they're smarter in terms of raw IQ. Potentially they just get stuck in a bootstrap loop where the kind of types that are selected for feel increasingly icky about people who display non-selected traits, and have progressively more homogenized children until the idiosyncratic genes are lost - with the unselected humans who felt the skin-crawling horror I feel now dying of old age before they can grind the process to a halt.
Obviously the "we'll hit AGI first" argument defeats this concern, but then, as you said, it kinda defeats all concerns. I think conversations like this one are best carried out with the understanding that we're talking about the "for some reason AGI takes another hundred years/isn't possible/etc." scenario, not one where extending this particular technology to infinity has to also interact with other technological breakthroughs that would happen in the meantime.
>I think conversations like this one are best carried out with the understanding that we're talking about the "for some reason AGI takes another hundred years/isn't possible/etc." scenario, not one where extending this particular technology to infinity has to also interact with other technological breakthroughs that would happen in the meantime.
Agreed. AGI (or at least ASI, if possible) overwhelms virtually all other concerns.
If embryo selection (and, possibly, genetic engineering of some sort) becomes pervasive, for generations, I share your concern about diversity being selected out.
I agree with Scott's
>I care about the kind of diversity where some people are Einstein and some are Taylor Swift and some are MLK. But all of those are healthy, high-IQ people who didn't die of spina bifida at age 4.
I expect that the long run effect of parental genetic selection wouldn't preserve that degree of diversity. I'd expect that, e.g. we would get _good_ predictors of the big 5 personality traits. And there would be a point in that 5-D space which predicts good life outcomes. And the large majority of parents would choose genes which predict close to that outcome. And the distribution of traits would narrow in the direction of a delta function at that point.
My main reason for not being concerned about this is (a) it will take multiple generations, perhaps even centuries (b) yeah, I really _do_ expect AGI to happen first, maybe 2-10 years, barring an antarctic level AI winter.
EDIT: Re personality traits, currently the effective dimensionality of the 5-D space, while not quite the full 5-D, is a bit over 4 (from ChatGPT, Claude agrees)
Even if pressure towards the optimal choice doesn't push it to a 0-D point (there are a range of socioeconomic niches...), I would be surprised if it doesn't at least collapse to a lower-dimensional attractor.
Your mistake here lies in predicting that choice in heritability leads to sameness. The genetic variance of a given population will not necessarily decrease with a loss of deleterious mutations, and traits that influence genetic variety are found within particular groups, so there's no worry about the loss of unibrows any time soon.
Additionally, you seem to be assuming that every trait will be optimized and selected for, even though we don't find this in practice. Genetic variation is hugely influenced by selective choice, and there is some evidence to suggest that this is genetically-determined and therefore resilient. The fact that you or I might want a tall, mathy, conventionally handsome, bisexual god for a partner doesn't mean that someone else might not have a strong preference for a medium-height, artistic, conventionally handsome (this probably won't change), heterosexual. So long as choice remains free, beneficial variation will persist.
Hi Scott, thanks for the thoughtful post. I was surprised to find myself very convinced, but then reflecting more on my un-ease, I think there is an ethical dilemma that haunts me, and I was curious your thoughts.
I'll assume that in a couple decades we'll have much stronger predictive power than today on a wider range of traits, in order to dispel objections around the efficacy or current menu of options.
Ethical Objection: Arms Race
Diving into "Ethical Objection: Cost," an underlying assumption seems to be that people's nominal choice is indeed a true and freely made choice. If we give people the means to choose, then they can choose freely whether or not to choose IQ of their embryo. But, given how competition is fundamental to human life, if your child's peers are getting ahead with genetic enhancements, then do you really have a choice? This looks a lot to me like an unavoidabe start of an arms race? Those who choose not to participate will be dooming their progeny to failure competing in society. To exacerbate the issue, I would imagine that the positive traits can compound, generation over generation.
I am sold that the category of traits control mere preferences (say, eye color) seem harmless, and traits that fight disease are good. Consider the category of "enhancements" that will make your child more competitive in society (whatever societal context you participate in). Does this lead to an arms race? If so, is that a good/bad/neutral thing?
Karl Marx argues that the surplus labor should be socialized back to leisure. This did not come to be, and China is one of the most competitive societies in the world now.
Deep thinkers from every end of the spectrum of economic theory have predicted that we'll have reduced competition, and more leisure for generations.
I'm starting to think it ain't gonna happen.
Evolutionary biology seems to have woven the need to compete and progress and race into our fibers.
By most accounts, hunter-gatherer societies had a lot of leisure time. We already are plenty productive, that's not what's stopping us from achieving this!
You could imagine some government presiding over a single country and limiting leisure, but as long as some people want a leg-up, or to get ahead, or to push their social status, or to indulge their ego, there will be competition, domestically. Internationally gets even crazier -- Without a credible threat of force from a governing body, no society would feel comfortable "being lazy" while another potentially maniacal society (bloodthirsty dictator, democracy with ethnonationalist ambitions, etc) can out-compete and threaten you.
> If this were a single-use medical treatment, delivered by a doctor after someone got the relevant condition, it would be one of the biggest advances of the decade - imagine a drug that cures 10 - 40% of breast cancers with no side effects! But in fact, it works for breast cancer, and schizophrenia, and heart attacks, and approximately everything else. The only things comparable are antibiotics and GLP-1RAs.
Vaccines too, aren't they?
Also, not to minimize the benefit of embryo selection if it works, but one difference from a drug that cures 10 - 40% of breast cancers (and other diseases...) is that it's like a drug that has to be given to the entire population, including those who don't have an won't go on to have breast cancer, in order to cure 10–40% of those who do get it, so this increases the cost (and, if you wouldn't otherwise use IVF, discomfort) per case cured — kind of like vaccines. Actually this may also be a reason there's more controversy around vaccines than other drugs: they are given to healthy people, whom it's not yet known if the vaccine will benefit, so people tolerate less risk of side-effects than someone who already has a disease and wants to get rid of it.
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((EDIT: already mentioned by other commenters:) One thing I didn't see mentioned: last time I've read about it, IVF itself had some moderate risks to the embryo; what's the situation with that now, and how does it compare to the benefits of embryo selection? This is relevant to those who consider IVF only in order to do embryo selection.)
Another minor point: Do the companies pay attention to avoiding inadvertent sex selection? If, say, breast cancer is more common than prostate cancer, or if they are worse at selecting against it, that could accidentally lead to the embryo with the lowest risk of the diseases they select against disproportionately being male. Widespread sex selection could cause problems (some people of the more common sex won't find a partner); here in the West I don't think most people have a strong sex preference about their children, but if we don't consider and avoid it, embryo selection could accidentally lead to sex selection even if nobody wants it.
> It depends on the number of embryos they have to work with; the more embryos, the better you can do by selecting the best.
You can do even better by selecting gametes from individuals who have the traits desired. If if you want to have a kid who is good at tennis then get sperm and egg donations from professional tennis players.
In general, reading a phenotypic effect off an actual phenotype is always going to be easier and more accurate than trying to do it from genes.
I'm sure some people will say "but I want my children to pass on my genes"; and fine, those people who want that can do it. But the government should also facilitate prospective parents who want make use of the best genomes out there.
> It’s probably even obvious for governments to pay for all citizens to get these, given how much they’d save on health care costs.
IMO it's a no-brainer for governments to do this, and offer genetic counselling including sperm/egg donation, for those people who want that. Governments would not only save on health care costs, they'd also benefit from a more intelligent and conscientious population with people less likely to commit crimes.
Yes, this technology is most helpful for people who want to have biological children with their life partner, and/or can't get the greatest genius in the world to donate a gamete to them. But I think that's 99% of people.
> and/or can't get the greatest genius in the world to donate a gamete to them
I envisage government-run gamete donor banks where donors are selected for things like: high IQ, high conscientiousness, high achievement, in good general health, not having committed serious crimes, being physically attractive, etc.
Because it's a lot easier to get sperm out of a man than eggs out of a woman, that would probably be what was mostly done.
> But I think that's 99% of people.
I agree with you that it's most people, but I would guess it's more like 70-80% than 99%. My reasons for this are:
(1) If I ever had kids I would want to go this route, as I have been held back all my life by poor mental health, and I wouldn't want the same to happen to my children.
(2) Most parents want their kids to have happy successful lives and if this helps, many would go for it.
(3) Never in my life has any parent bragged to me about how ugly or stupid their child is, but many times have they done the opposite.
(4) As well as optimising for being clever, this process can also optimise for children who're good looking or have pleasant personalities. I feel this last one might be important to many parents considering they will be in close proximity to their kid for the next 18 or so years.
(5) Adoption is a thing in many cultures. In some cultures you could even adopt people after you were dead!
Obviously if 20-30% of kids were created by this route and so had high genetic quality, that would improve things in any country.
This is fascinating and IN PRINCIPLE sounds like great things happening fast, but I have an incredibly strong feeling that the whole text seems to devote much more attention to comparatively lesser concerns ("we don't have this as good for non white people yet", "what if I still get x cancer even if I had a 5 vs 10% chance) and only fairly briefly cover the huge, glaring, elephant in the room: implementing this on anything even remotely societal scale (even within the top 25%) would completely, possibly irrevocably change how one of the key human life-form / species - relevant functions is carried out. That this is "IVF only" option seems to be huge. Unless you have a massive genetic burden (and even then testing and aborting if detected seems better), this seems a real hurdle?
On the other hand, expanding to individual pregnancies would massively up abortion rate in women "trying for optimal" or at least "trying for good enough", which would create its own issues (and a big outcry in groups already opposed to abortion or on the fence regarding it).
> Selecting the best of five or ten embryos is not a very effective way to get the genes you want
I appreciate that Scott mentions this primarily because it is quite common in popular culture to go around claiming that PGS embryo screening will give people “superbabies” and this claim is obviously a marketing gimmick.
The within-family validation that Herasight has done is great and shows that their screening can help parents increase the chance that their kids will lead healthier lives. I think that’s great! But we shouldn’t oversell the technology because that just breeds mistrust and resentment.
If you've already decided to do IVF, I think the rest is footnotes. One has to manually select somehow in any case. (I disregard scare talk using thought-stop words like "eugenics." If someone has a particular objection, I'm happy to consider it.)
For my part, I strongly favor making babies the natural way.
Arguments about the genetic components of heritability (or lack thereof) often seem sort of unresolvable with existing techniques since there is no independent variable to manipulate when you're dealing with humans. e.g. If you hypothesize an allele causes black fur on an animal, you can manipulate it (by breeding or CRISPRing) & see if you're right : a proper attempt at falsification. In humans, there's no manipulation so you have to all kinds of correlative stuff, which kind of can't make causal inference. (Theoretical considerations aside, not being able to directly test stuff seems to make progress way, way slower.)
I have my reservations about current PRS, but I am hopeful the application of these sorts of technologies could produce exactly the sort of data that could resolve some of these arguments & increase predictive power: by actually *testing* trait predictions, not on a held-out set (which could have the same confounders as the training data) but with a real experiment (selecting or CRISPRing an embryo). The resulting data could have long-term benefits. Even in the unrealistic extreme case where everything is population stratification and selection on PRS didn't work at all, that would suck for the people who paid for the service but would be a very valuable result scientifically & medically.
(Of course this assumes that there is enough high quality follow-up work measuring the traits people selected in this way, and enough transparency on the part of the firms offering this service about their predictive algorithms. Also practical considerations mean that this won't exactly be a controlled trial & there will probably be dramatic selection effects based on the sort of people who pay for it. But still better than just running regressions on biobank data.)
Modifying genes was impossible for most time and still very restricted, but many people tried creating environments to create geniuses and barely found anything; most educational interventions produce IQ gains in children that fade in adulthood.
"Confounders" here are not environment variables (like nitrogen in soil for plants); if anti-hereditarians determine that a trait is "confounded" they don't learn how to modify environment to change a trait, but they actually find that people like to self-segregate and the rich will pay money so their child wouldn't attend same school as children of poor. In some sense, when people can migrate where they want, unlike North Korea, is very good!
Some of "confounding" might be womb environment rather than "school quality", did they test that?
But hey, we could just clone a few geniuses instead of trying to analyze what of 6 billion bp makes them, and who is against that the most?
All the companies you've mentioned are going off of public bio-bank data from what I can tell. Is there a reason they haven't tried to prove out their technology by raising some genetically predicted super mice, and provide empirical evidence (through enough overly healthy and smart mice) that this technology works?
I absolutely approve of reducing the risk of disease. It also seems profoundly stupid to spend lots of money on determining hair color when hair dye is a thing. Most people don't even know Christina Hendricks isn't a natural redhead.
>Mark my words, one day there will be entire subfields of therapy dedicated to these issues.
I feel like this is the core of the issue, really. When people say "I am more than my genes," they're probably not saying "I deny that statistical correlations between genes and outcomes exist," they're saying "I do not want my kids to grow up being told they're Genetically Superior/Inferior." Which is a correct thing to say!
They're going to realize eventually. Obviously they're going to figure out why their parents (and everyone else) is paying absurd amounts of cash on these interventions. It's not just because they feel like it, it's because the products of such interventions are simply better. People are going to realize that it all boils down to genes. The societal consequences that will be interesting to see for sure, and I'm surprised Scott didn't mention that. Some lies serve a purpose.
> Somebody in Macaronesia in 3525 AD will avoid getting breast cancer because of you (if there is still cancer; if there are still breasts).
Big breasts are a burden (literally), genetically engineer flat-chested women and men who are not attracted to breasts.
I wanted to say that you can go even further, do parallel gender selection away from the accidents of evolutionary attraction toward more functional bodies that we would consider ugly now, but... in reality the fertility crisis will likely result in artificial wombs/vat babies/cloning much sooner than 3525, decoupling procreation from attraction and eventually making sexual attraction a weird rudiment that the enlightened aces (and eventually everyone) would sneer at.
The Selection objection I find strange. If you had been selected for pretty eyes regardless of cancer risk, you still won the billion:one lottery! The remarkable odds against any of us existing at all makes this a silly objection. If they had made a "better" choice regarding cancer, you wouldn't exist!
Yes, and I think people will also complain about their parents selecting them for eyes rather than cancer risk (while still not wishing they didn't exist).
I agree there's a philosophical sense where if their parents had done anything differently, they wouldn't exist, but I think it's a very weak sense. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help . Or compare to the example of someone whose grandparents (before they were born) left their parents money for their college education, but their parents gambled it away and lost everything. Now, there is some sense in which if the parents hadn't gone to the casino, it would have jostled the sperm in their testicles slightly differently, and a different child would have eventually been born instead of them. But I think it would still be reasonable to resent your parents for this, even though in some weak sense it caused you to exist.
Sure, but I think there's a tangible difference in that in the selection case the parents made a conscious choice of me vs another, and presumably I know that. In the gambled away example it *feels* more random, disconnecting the choice from the existence in one's mind. Even though it could be argued that the end result is the same, complaining in the first case seems more unreasonable and less defendable.
Don't IVF babies have modestly higher baseline rates of birth defects and other health problems?
If you already need to do IVF, sure, adding genetic selection largely makes sense. But if you don't need IVF, it would be important to consider not just the health downsides for the mother of doing IVF but also the health tradeoffs for the baby, right?
> Although GP would continue to only test for health outcomes, you could forward the raw data from GP to Nucleus, and Nucleus would predict extra traits, including height, BMI, eye color, hair color, ADHD, IQ, and even handedness.
It does seem important to ensure your kids have an even number of hands.
"Suppose you invest the $3,250 in an index fund that makes 7% over inflation, then give it to your future child when they turn 45 (average age of type 2 diabetes diagnoses). Now it’s worth $75,000. Is this the “true” cost of the intervention?". no, $75k in 46 years is less than the true cost, which is $3250 today. it is less because $3250 can buy $75k in 46 years or it can buy other things which are likely more valuable. we know they're likely to be more valuable because people use their marginal $3250s to buy them and not $75k in 46 years
of course sometimes people do trade $3250 today for $75k in 46 years, usually when saving for retirement. so sometimes the two are the same. but your post seemed to imply that this was not the next-best use of the money
So much rigor here and then "AGI is going to cure all disease and I know that with overwhelming confidence despite the entire history of human folly regarding such predictions"
Eventually we are going to automate scientific research through artificial intelligence. Not clear when. Soon after that happens, I think it’s reasonable to assume that most diseases will be cured, just as we might assume that most diseases will be cured with enough scientific study
I'm less sanguine about what will happen to medicine, but I _do_ expect that, barring an antarctic level AI winter, AI will radically change the whole game.
Is the set of "such predictions" constructed ex post as a list of predictions that did not turn out to be true before August 2025? Or was there a way to create this list e.g. 100 years ago, without including other foolish ideas, such as computers or airplanes?
Would you like to comment on the topic actually discussed in the above post instead of telling us how you think AGI isn't going to happen for the millionth time?
I think the main worry I have about this technology, (and about selective reproduction programs like ones attempted by Musk or things like The Repository for Germinal Choice) is some variation of "what gets measured gets managed".
That is, we are going to use this technology to optimize things that we can measure. These things that we can measure, like IQ, are imperfect heuristics for things that we actually care about (intelligence or mental capacity or academic potential I guess?). And even those are simpler than the things that we actually-actually care about which are at the level of our society and culture - overall standard of living, kindness, freedom, etc...
So if we gain the power to optimize for things, and we start optimizing for the heuristics that we have available to us, like IQ, we may face an alignment problem. Maybe the things that we can measure right now (like our current conception of IQ), or the things that are in vogue right now (height, particular shades of eye color), are misaligned with the things that we might ultimately care about.
So maybe IQ is negatively correlated with some other important set of traits that are murky and difficult to define and we can't measure very well (say, creativity or being an empathetic human being, or "research taste" or etc...). Just because these things are hard to define and difficult to measure doesn't mean they're any less important.
Furthermore, traits that may be beneficial for individuals may not be beneficial for society. So maybe an individual does better with higher IQ within our current society, but a society where a significant number of individual have a higher IQ undergoes a phase transition which is worse in some way. Maybe it's an overall higher level of cynicism, or a breakdown in the useful fictions that create some form of social cohesion and makes economic cooperation possible. Maybe it's a loss of overall diversity of the population that makes the overall population more fragile.
I guess my overall feeling on this is that we are so primitive in our understanding about these things, and our power to make changes to our genome may advance much faster than our understanding about the societal consequences of those changes. And part of me thinks "but I suppose that's just science in general", and part of me thinks "no, that's just technological determinism!".
This post made me think a lot about the silo series by Hugh Howey. Is humankind doomed because the advances in our power to change the world and ourselves outpaces the wisdom required to wield it without destroying ourselves?
This sounds like the antagonistic pleiotropy suggestion, but see my response above. In practice most good things are correlated with one another.
I am also very worried about our power to change the world outpacing our wisdom, which is why I want to intelligence-enhance children as soon as possible! I agree intelligence isn't exactly the same as wisdom, but it's probably pretty correlated. If it isn't, feel free to submit an ACX Grants proposal to develop a genetic predictor for wisdom!
It seems to me the most important ethical consideration is the one you treat the most glibly, that parents will be making a specific choice about what their kids should be like, that their kids DNA will effectively become a message vector in our society. This isn't just a matter for therapy, this means inviting all the most irrational cultural pathologies into our genetic code, and basically making future generations subject to a certain biological totalitarianism by their parents. It seems to me an exceptional important ethical consideration to standardize any selection process so that it ceases to be a potential message vector.
Stuff like this: "How much would you pay to give your children an extra 1-4 years of healthy life?" and framing things in terms of how much better you're making your child's life is misleading. You're not making anyone live longer, you're bringing into being someone who lives a longer life over someone who lives a shorter life. I might pay a lot to make my actual dog live four years longer, but that reason doesn't automatically translate to a reason of the same strength to buy or breed a chihuaha rather than a great dane, even though in the same sense I am "giving my dog a longer life".
If you're a repugnant-conclusion bullet-biting totalist utilitarian then this difference doesn't matter but for most other plausible moral perspectives (especially those on which your reasons regarding your children are stronger than those regarding strangers) it does. That's not to say you don't have any reason to bring about a longer-lived child, but it's very plausibly not a reason of nearly the same strength as your reason to cure your child of a disease which would end their life early.
It isn't going to end with just wanting to make sure your kid doesn't have diabetes. Genetic disease is the bogus gateway drug. This is a frankensteinian future with a million unintended consequences. No one is going to think about, or care about those unintended consequences until it is too late.
This isn't a spinning jenny moment. This is playing God. Historically, philosophically, morally - that never ends well.
The problem with the "unintended consequences" argument is it's far too broad. When people invented agriculture, writing, metalworking, or movable type, all those had unintended consequences.
If we ban everything that might have unintended consequences, we ban all progress.
All evidence suggests that there either is no God, it's asleep at the wheel, or it doesn't have our wellbeing as a high priority. Thus, we might as well play God because it's us or nothing.
God is welcome to show up and do his job if God objects to someone trying to cover his shift.
The argument about Dude, Genetic determinism has a fine side. Basically, not that this is a reason that we should not do this. But basically, if you really think about the stength of these predictions, they are not very strong. After use for selection, there are very few situations where the information about future traits would be useful compared to not knowing (mostly test order for diagnosis). If these techniques get broader, they are still weak evidence about what someone will become. These companies do not publish the remaining variance from the expected values published (especially for IQ and healthspans), and they should. If you really internalize those, doing that behavior is obviously dumb. The variance remaining (either from what a 3 percent chance means, or the remaining lifespan variance, or the IQ variance not explained), is often high enough that bets against the low probability even need to make sense, and having strong expectations about how children will end up are in general, low to negative EV even if your are expectations are right, and even decisions based on that expectation with bad payoffs in the low probabilty case should be avoided, for obvious reasons. That is, the fact that the obvious case is so obvious is tripping up the complainers.
I think this is not true once you take into account cohort effects. Although it might be true that the people who die earlier have fewer working years on average, most of the extra mortality is among the old who wouldn't be working anyway (and may instead depend on the public purse for pensions etc).
I don't expect the average ACX reader to be persuaded by my thoughts on the immorality of IVF in general, let alone embryo selection. Those arguments are out there if you want to look for them.
But perhaps you feel a bit of disgust at the thought of people picking out children like they'd pick out puppies from a breeder. If you can have a labradoodle, why not a blue-eyed blond baby with ten more IQ points and a 32% lower risk of cancer?
I also think this post glosses over the cost/inequality aspect of it. There are billions of people on earth who are never going to be able to afford this. Their descendants in the next few generations won't be able to, either (barring some weird post-scarcity techno-utopia AI-world, which I'm not counting on). What does the world look like in 2125 after a few generations of elites selecting embryos (with the technology presumably improving along the way) while 4 billion or so Africans can't or won't? As embryo selection gets better, people will be picking for everything you can imagine: looks, athletic ability, artistic talent, etc. You'd be on the way to having two totally different human species. Doesn't this sound like a dystopian sci-fi novel to y'all?
What's the state of polygenetic prediction for Big 5 personality traits? Supposing you think AI will make IQ and "boring" illnesses like cancer, T2D, and heart disease irrelevant. You might reasonably conclude that you should focus your efforts on having kids who are kind, thoughtful, creative, and emotionally stable (or at least not unhinged assholes). Would love to know how many SDs you could move on various Big 5 traits as a function of number of embryos chosen from.
Has anyone written at any length about the potential for personality selection?
Seems like there are 4 big categories of traits ordered by controversy:
1. Clearly negative health based traits (genetic diseases, propensity for high cholesterol, etc)
2. Clearly positive traits, not clearly health-related (IQ, balance, etc)
3. Preference based aesthetic traits (eye color, height)
4. Personality traits (neuroticism, openness to experience, etc)
Of course, many traits will blend between multiple categories. IQ is correlated with mortality, tons of psychiatric conditions are associated with big 5, etc. By and large, though, I’d guess that there are more who would object to eye color than to IQ and more to IQ than to cancer risk.
Personality traits seem to be objectionable on entirely new criteria than the rest. It’s one thing to charitably select for lower incidence of cancer in your kids and a whole other thing to select for kids that are likely to have a charitable attitude or a certain belief structure. This seems inevitable, though. If we can select against depression we will eventually be able to select for gregariousness, for ambition, for any number of other traits. There’s the question of if this is ethical to do at all and then the secondary question of, if it is, is it ethical to select for a personality for your kids that is, for example, less likely to be happy but more likely to be successful?
"Most genetic data available for research/commercial use comes from the UK, US, and Europe - areas which are mostly white." All three had been working on this problem by making their populations less white, although the US has shifted on that in the past six months.
I think people in the rationalism community should definitely not select for higher IQ fetuses, because they likely already carry risk factors for autism. In another population it'd be fine; in this one it's riskier.
Some guy with a similarly sounding blog wrote a whole post about this! But to sum up, *actual* autism is negatively correlated, but SNPs for IQ are positively correlated.
So if you have two parents that are on the BAP - broader autism phenotype - they already have a much higher risk for having an autistic child. If you do embryo selection on IQ you're also much more likely to select the autistic child because there's overlap between IQ SNPs and autism SNPs; some of these are the same SNPs.
I'm glad you have addressed this concern, but you have not really internalized it properly.
> Ask anybody dealing with regular insulin injections (let alone limb amputations) whether it would be worth $27,000 to wave a magic wand and not have Type 2 diabetes! It’s not a hard question!
The proper question is, whether it would be worth $27,000 to wave a magic wand and be replaced by your sibling who doesn't have Type 2 diabetes. I agree this is not a hard question.
Also, while I follow and agree with all your points intellectually, I just can't share your seeming enthusiasm. "romantic and aesthetic"? Yeah, nothing says romantic like selecting an embryo based on the polygenic score calculations.
99% of people who could theoretically exist will never exist, no matter what you do. We may as well take some responsibility instead of leaving it to chance and pretending that absolves us.
I read recently about multi-PGS where they take PGS for seemingly unrelated traits and make composite predictor (which might be non-linear) with better score. But I found very little about it.
Eugenics carries a deeply negative legacy, for reasons any student of history will understand. That said, it’s worth distinguishing modern genetic screening from its past abuses.
Preventing heritable diseases is widely considered a positive goal. Reducing the burden of serious medical conditions can improve individual lives and contribute to public health. Using technology to improve the overall condition of the human species is a valid long-term goal.
Moreover, I submit that the defining feature of our species is intelligence. In today’s society, lower cognitive functioning can be a barrier to employment and independence, while higher cognitive ability is linked to greater productivity. If reproductive technology allows parents to select for intelligence, does it really matter if they, at the same time, choose their children's eye color?
You go on to mention race. While obvious characteristics like skin color are irrelevant, science has repeatedly observed group-level differences in cognitive outcomes across populations. These differences correlate strongly with the prosperity of the respective societies. At the same time, fertility tends to decline as societies become more prosperous - something noticed even in antiquity. This is, effectively, a brake on human progress. Whether this can, in the long-term, be addressed by genetic screening?
If a company is selling a product that costs tens of thousands, but there's not really any way to verify the product worked in practice without doing a study across large numbers of the product's customers over 80 years... then I'd have a very high prior that it doesn't work as advertised. The potential for fraud or mistakes is too high.
If it doesn't work for whatever reason, by the time this can be proven to a legal standard (particularly the parts relating to the longevity of the selected children, and their disease frequency in later life), the customers and the founders will be dead, and the company may no longer exist for your grandchildren to sue.
Or, to put it another way, if I wanted an unethical way to get rich, I could sell expensive products whose efficacy couldn't be disproven until after my death.
I think this is a concern, but we already have a culturally normal practice for something similar: the construction business. We regularly contract companies to build houses and bridges and so on intended to last for 100+ years. I think many of the same ways we assess the reliability of construction can be applied to embryo selection, albeit with a lot more uncertainty at this stage.
Because the selection involves a variety of traits that become evident in different years after the purchase, we can assess how reliable the company is to some extent long before we get to the 80 years out threshold: firstly you can genotype the baby to see if the claimed genes are actually what's in the kid. Secondly, there are traits like eye color that show up within a few years, traits like height that show up within a few decades etc.
In that time, we also get more data on the genetics of cancer and other long-term risks in the population in general, and we can compare the results of the embryo selected vs the baseline.
That really doesn't seem to apply to the case where a store sells you an item with a promise that it will or won't do a thing 40 years later. Or that it's 10% less likely to do a thing 40 years later. How much class action do you need for a bunch of customers to get together 40 years later and say "hey, this thing you sold me wasn't actually any more likely to do the thing than the version we could have got for free!"
If I go into a store to buy a stand mixer, and they promise to sell me a stand mixer, and then wheel out a concrete mixer - well yeah technically it's a mixer but come off it, mate.
At the moment, I think the technology is at the level of "we can tell you if the embryo has Down's syndrome or CF" and they're promising (but unlikely to deliver on) "if millions of people select on these criteria we supply, then in twenty years time out of the hundreds of thousands of babies born, there may well be an overall 1 point increase in population IQ" but leaving the clients to parse that as "my baby might be 6 points smarter!"
You and your wife are reasonably smart people, she's going to take care of herself during pregnancy, and you as parents are not going to fold, spindle or mutilate any kids you have. So there's a good chance any future babies will turn out okay. Will that be due to the genetic selection? God alone knows! But I'm fairly sure the company does not.
They're selling hope in a bucket and badmouthing their competitors in the effort to grab market share, market advantage, and those sweet, sweet, aspirant dollars before they go as bust as 70s cryonics companies.
I'm guessing (I haven't read any PGS company's offers) that they are promising to do only what they can do - to offer customers the choice of embryos to implant based on the polygenic risk scores they have scored the embryos for. The actual outcome will be indistinguishable from chance on an individual basis, as you say. It's only in retrospect, across hundreds of thousands of people, that any impact will be noticed.
I was trying to think of an analogy, and I think it's like an impressionist painting. Up close, every splash of colour is just a splash of colour. You have to take a good step back to appreciate the image. Up close, each individual is just that, and, except for some Mendelian single-variant conditions, it's impossible to pin down a talent, ability, condition or illness to any one cause. It's only from a distance of hundreds of thousands of people that you can see a pattern.
EDIT: And for that reason, I rather think that what these companies are really selling is a chance for parents to believe they have chosen the best they can for their child.
1. This allow parents to select sex of a child as well, which could move us away from natural balance in which for every 100 girls 105 boys are born.
2. Selecting for obvious traits like risk for certain diseases, IQ, etc, might also unintentionally select for some and against some other traits that weren't even considered. This too might skew the natural frequency of some traits... making some more prevalent than is optimal, and some less prevalent than is optimal.
3. This opens the can of worms which will allow kids to blame their parents for pretty much any negative outcome in their lives - whatever they did: if they used this technology and kid turns out to be unhappy or to have some disease, they can blame parents for wrong choice; if they didn't use this technology and conceived naturally, kids can blame parents for NOT using this.
4. In general kids lose some of their dignity points by not just coming into their parent's life, but becoming in some ways their explicitly engineered product. Imagine a situation in which a kid is selected for high IQ, and then is pushed by ambitious parents to become some wunderkind or to excel academically, while the kid itself turns out to be completely uninterested in such a thing and would prefer to be a soccer player or a plumber. Imagine the kind of arguments that could ensue. "Did I in vain select you to be so smart? Now you want to waste all that potential?!
- F**k you and your embryo selection! I'm my own person!"
5. If eventually personality traits become a part of the equation, so we can select for them as well, there is a risk that humanity could become much more homogeneous, we could become a society in which popular traits are very frequent, even if "popular" doesn't necessarily mean optimal, especially not on a level of whole population. (For example, for a single person, it might be optimal to have some "good" personality, but for the entire population it might be more optimal if not all people have such "good" personality, and we also have a fair share of quirky people, neurotics, introverts, etc... For example high neuroticism might be required for taking seriously X-risks)
6. Achieving genetic perfection could put more pressure on people to perform, because now they have no excuse. If you fail in life, it's only you to blame.
7. In general it interferes with natural selection and introduces elements of artificial selection. A thing that we do to dogs, for example. Many of the breeds created by this process actually have worse health and fitness than mongrels.
8. There is a open question about how many embryos to select from. It could be 5, 10, 50, 100... or more? Each choice could be criticized.
1 is already an issue. Parents using IVF in the US can select by gender, and apparently it's socially acceptable in educated circles to do so, as long as you are selecting for a girl. In the EU, it's illegal to select by gender (though I'm not sure of how this can be tightly enforced).
Gender-selective abortion bans came about in the EU because, surprise surprise, turns out parents (particularly those of certain ethnicities whose culture place much more value on sons) wanted boys and were aborting girls, even if that was already illegal since they could find a compliant doctor if necessary, although it is a complex question - some studies find a skewed ratio in live births, others don't, and there is a natural ration of 105 male to 100 female live births anyhow.
No need to even look at "certain ethnicities", I am telling you: it is now socially acceptable and standard among upper-middle class Americans to place much more value on daughters, it would seem; they discuss how, when doing IVF, they implant only female embryos at first, and use male embryos, if at all, only as a fail-safe. Some women of the same class discuss openly and freely how, if they got pregnant in the natural way, they would abort a male embryo or foetus, exclusively because of its sex. Epistemic warning: anecdotal evidence.
Not sure if you, or the companies, have answered this elsewhere, but I can think of two more issues. You've discussed the relative risk of developing the condition, but not the absolute risk, nor the severity of the condition. Some of the conditions tested are exceeding rare, and so even a 90% reduction might not mean much. And to pick breast cancer survival for example, while apparently the risk is rather high for the average woman (about 14%), the outcomes if not diagnosed late are actually pretty good. And you don't know the severity of those who will get the disorder. Maybe the ~7% who do get breast cancer will have a kind that is more aggressive or treatment resistant, which means the the relative risk is misleading and this process is actually not worth it.
The other issue is that in removing these genetics from the gene pool, you're removing beneficial traits that are harder to identify. Lets say that people with schizophrenia genetics are more... adept at being altruistic or something like that. You could develop a society that's perfectly healthy but but there's a statistical predisposition to selfishness that changes the whole culture.
So how exactly does this differ from eugenics?
If you mean "how does it differ from the kind of eugenics where you murder people", the main difference is that you're not murdering people.
If you mean "how does it differ from the kind of eugenics where people screen for carrier status before they have kids together", the main difference is it's more effective and works for a broader number of conditions.
If you just mean "nice technology you've got there, shame if I were to associate it with a vague and inconsistently used term that has negative valence", see my old post on the Worst Argument In The World - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
Maybe you've done this elsewhere (please point me to it if so!), but it would be helpful to justify the idea that embryos aren't people because if they are you're doing precisely that.
See discussion downthread at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suddenly-trait-based-embryo-selection/comment/140960824
I agree with the argument that the couple choosing not to have a 4th child is not equivalent to murder, but I still think you're dodging the actual moral question of eugenics. With embryonic trait selection, the parents are actively making a choice that some kinds of life are not worth living e.g. Downs syndrome. Talking about this as "eliminating disease" is just not morally consistent with how we think about curing disease in living creatures, individuals are deciding those genes shouldn't exist. This is an act of commission by the parent(s).
I reflected on your post about ethical objections based on personhood, and want to offer some reactions. In order:
1. The alcoholic: This is an act of omission. Yes, there is an act of commission to avoid changing an embryo in a harmful way, but really she's choosing to not do something. It is a choice that a life with fetal alcohol syndrome is not as desirable as a life without fetal alcohol syndrome, which has bearing on the topic, but it's not quite the same because she's not already pregnant. A better scenario is if she was pregnant and a heavy drinker, and she has to choose to abort the child, quit drinking, then get pregnant again. Of course, if you think an embryo isn't a form of human life, it may be academic to you, but you may find differing responses to an act of omission vs the act of commission of choosing a life isn't worth living.
2. The intern: This is a delegated act of commission to select for a trait, and the delegate changes its mind based on new data. We’re not arguing about destiny here, we’re arguing about intent of the parents.
3. The parenting workshop: Honestly, this situation feels so manufactured, I don’t understand the relevance. Here, an act of commission (the workshop attendance) has some probabilistic effect on the children in the chaotic, nonlinear system that is life which you can’t control for at all. But polygenic screening is an act of commission with a probabilistic effect on the child born and a completely deterministic effect on the kinds of people not born.
My aunt has some kind of mental disability since birth, though she has led a fulfilling life through her family's efforts and her own. And now I can just choose that life doesn't deserve to exist, at least not as much as another one. That kind of power gives me pause, both for the moral implications and for what it does to the human genetic pool over time. There's probably some useful data about genetic populations that ritually killed children with undesirable traits (Sparta I think?) to understand more about the second-order effects, but I'm willing to grant the first-order effects are almost always greater than the second-order ones.
FWIW these questions are not academic to my family, we meet the criteria you outline, but still both feel deeply uncomfortable with making a decision like that. I am sympathetic that others that have experienced or witness terrible genetic afflictions may feel strongly the other way and simply not want to experience it again themselves, but I feel differently about accepting such tech at the limit and endorsing it as a mainstream technology that everyone should do for any reason they feel like.
I think it's pretty easy to route around your objections here. For example, suppose that it was discovered that a certain prenatal vitamin, let's say Vitamin C, decreased the risk of Down Syndrome (I think this is plausible; even though Down Syndrome is a genetic condition, it has to do with chromosomes failing to sort into sells normally, and some vitamin could improve the sorting process). Do you think it would be immoral for doctors to tell women trying to get pregnant to take Vitamin C?
(sorry, the next part is going to sound kind of anti-intellectual and ad hominem, but I think we're going to go in circles forever without it)
I worry you're going to come up with some set of complicated philosophical rules around probabilistic acts of omission or something that successfully rules in the Vitamin C scenario but rules out the polygenic selection scenario, and I will think those rules aren't interesting/relevant, and we'll be right back where we started. The reason I wouldn't ban mothers from taking Vitamin C isn't because it's *almost* an evil act but barely escapes because of something something probalistic acts of omission. It's because it's not even close to having anything wrong with it in any way.
I feel like it only starts to seem wrong if you're doing some kind of very vague zooming out and squinting, such that every act is judged by things that it vaguely rhymes with as seen through the lens of some kind of extreme and selective paranoia. For example, if I prepare to cut off my child's arm with an axe, and you say "No, don't do that!", then I say "OH, SO YOU'RE SAYING THAT ONE-ARMED PEOPLE ARE SCUM WHO DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE AND SHOULD ALL BE GENOCIDED?", I am doing some kind of weird paranoid drawing-implications-that-I-shouldn't act. We don't require any kind of complex philosophy to justify why I can suggest you not cut off your child's arm, it's a completely normal action that only seems related to evil things if you doing the zoom-out-squint-and-be-paranoid manuever.
I think it is better to not have a disease (including a genetic disease) than to have it (I try to justify that more at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nobody-can-make-you-feel-genetically ) I don't think this justifies hurting people with existing genetic diseases (because that would hurt a real, living person). But I do think it justifies creating people without genetic diseases rather than people with those diseases (since this isn't hurting any particular real person with a claim not to be hurt). In order to deny this, you need to create some kind of concept of potential-people's-rights which is going to imply all sorts of insane things later, then come up with new ad hoc shaky philosophical principles to whack-a-mole down each insane implication one by one.
My claim is that this comes from basically the same anti-playing-god place as opposition to vaccines, opposition to antibiotics, etc, that each step gets grandfathered in as it no longer seems like scary new technology and instead is just part of the scenery, and people invent new ad hoc philosophical distinctions each time to explain why last year's "playing God" is obviously okay and it would be horrendous to deny a dying person antibiotics, but this year's "playing God" is still bad. I think instead of doing that we should just abandon the "playing God" concept - at least if we're not religious and don't think there's an actual God who objects to this - and just try to make the world better, as best we can, while moving slowly and watching out for risks.
(an analogy for why I am not so concerned about risks in this case: suppose that we learned most existing disabilities are caused by some kind of radiation coming from the Earth's core. Then there was an earthquake, it disrupted the earth's core, and the level of radiation cut in half. Then only half as many children were born disabled as before. Would you support randomly mutilating / lobotomizing / irradiating babies until we returned to the current disability rate? Why not? It seems like either you must believe that, in expectation, the pre-earthquake level of disability is likely to be better, because there's some compelling reason why having fewer disabilities would be risky or disrupt society, or else you must believe the opposite. If the latter, you should support the random mutilations; if the former, you should support efforts to have fewer disabled children born now. I think almost nobody would support the mutilation in this scenario, and that's because they aren't drawing off some real belief that there are potential risks that outweigh benefits, they're just going off of the belief that all previous ways of playing God are fine but all new ways of playing God feel scary or like they're making aggressive ethical claims)
(here's another thought experiment - suppose that a genetic engineering technique is discovered that lets people "correct" cystic fibrosis after a child is born, but it costs $1 million. A child is dying of cystic fibrosis. Is it ethical to engineer out the cystic fibrosis gene to save the child? Definitely yes, right? Okay, now suppose you are a CF carrier planning to conceive a child. There is a 50-50 chance it has CF. You can either conceive randomly, have a kid with cystic fibrosis, and spend your entire life savings and go deep into debt in order to immediately engineer it out. Or you can do embryo selection for $3000. Either way, you're ending up with a child who doesn't have the gene for cystic fibrosis - you're just wasting an extra $997,000 the first way for no reason)
I am sure your aunt is a very nice person and you are glad she exists. I have a friend with an embryo-selected child. This child seems nice, as far as babies go, and I am also glad she exists. I'm not demanding you kill your aunt any more than you're demanding that I kill my friend's baby. If you accuse me of somehow by-implication thinking of your aunt as "life that doesn't deserve to exist", I will accuse you of somehow by-implication thinking of my friend's baby as "life that doesn't deserve to exist". I think better than that would be for neither of us to accuse the other of anything like that, both agree that existing people can continue to exist (both because they themselves want to exist and because they have many friends and relatives who love them) but keep potential people on the table as a group we can have ethical discussion about without thereby insulting any existing people, who are fine. I think you have to do that to argue about embryo selection at all, but I think once you've done that the argument is strong and we can optimize for things like giving people better lives.
(and it's not academic to me either - my own aunt died of cancer three years ago. I am against this and hope that my descendants don't have to go through this process. I think this is a real harm - in the sense that there will be a real person who dies, and real family members who mourn them - in a way that makes it stronger than the potential harm caused to potential people just because you selected another person before they existed).
First, I appreciate the detailed response. To cut to the chase, of course, I agree that we both agree that existing people can continue to agree. To be more expansive, nobody writes this much in public about these topics, endures the psychic damage of writing in public, then goes back for seconds in the comments because they don't care about people. If nothing else, I have no doubt how much you care, and we are arguing about what is the best way to help people. I also find the idea of complicated philosophical rules to judge each case exhausting and impractical. There are guidelines built on a set of assumptions, and if you're outside that set of assumptions, you have to use your best judgement.
As for keeping potential people on the table we can have ethical discussions about, I'd need to think about it more. The obvious case is homosexuality. If the straights decide no more gay kids, do gays have a right to be angry? Wouldn't your logic dictate they have no right to be angry, and it's on them to make more gay kids? If we get artificial wombs and the gay agenda decides to buy all their supply to flood the world with gays, do the straights have a right to be angry (sorry, this was just an amusing counterfactual to imagine)? Or do we get into a thousand cases of protected traits, lobbying, who gets to decide what to protect, etc.?
It is not my intention to accuse you of killing or judging people walking around, though you are clearly at least judging your own progeny's potential if you are using the service. I think that is the crux of the different perspectives here: you seem to look at the result and if it gives the result you want, the process is judged good, without judging intent, initial conditions, or actions taken. I am not a utilitarian, I lean virtue ethics so the details matter. This is a case of virtues conflicting, which is the main reason I do not like prescriptive morality for these situations because, again, the details matter and there is no substitute for critical thinking.
Consider this also a request for a post about the strength of your conviction in near-term AGI with selecting children for traits that may not show up well past that horizon. I presume it's good insurance if AGI doesn't show up/can't fix them in time?
Hi Scott-In aggregate are you convinced with the IQ screening data of these companies? And if so, would you select Herasight over the competitors?
Of course not advice. Jeff
The IQ screening data hasn't been released yet. I trust Herasight by reputation but I can't say anything about the data yet.
As I understand it IVF already involves selecting the most-likely-to-implant embryos and discarding others, or using multiple embryos with the understanding that not all of them will implant. This was a relatively common argument in abortion debates.
You're correct this applies in general to ivf. Using multiple embryos seems fine - you're doing the best you can for them to live. Discarding the ones you don't want would not be moral if you view them as having moral standing.
*If* you're using IVF, and already making a bunch of extra embryos, then you have to select which to implant, so it's not any new problem.
But if you were just going to do it the old fashioned way, and now are making a bunch of embryos, you've created a new problem.
If embryos and fetuses are people in a way that matters to God enough that it should matter to humans who believe in God, then God has a lot of explaining to do about why He randomly murders, at barest minimum, 10% of all people in utero.
And that murder rate isn't actually 10%, it's closer to 40 or 50%, given that most of the people God murders in utero, He murders in secret, without the uterus-haver ever knowing they were pregnant.
Oh, and God practices eugenics, too, as He statistically targets people with genetic abnormalities for this form of murder.
A source for the numbers on spontaneous abortion, aka miscarriage, is here: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pregnancy-loss-miscarriage/symptoms-causes/syc-20354298 , but this information is everywhere.
The only moral difference between spontaneous abortion and induced abortion (and embryo disposal) is nothing. We are acting in God's image when we use the tools He gave us to end pregnancies we deem nonviable.
The argument about abortion is about people's irrational religious faith, nothing more.
I never said anything about God. But by your logic since God kills millions of people of people every year by disease, so we are acting in his image if we create and use bioweapons to do the same.
Exactly.
Huh, big bioweapon fan. I admit, i didn't expect that.
I just left this on The Worst Argument in the World, but I'll put it here too:
"This is such a good post that it's worth perfecting. The Martin Luther King example is a bad one. I've never heard anyone use the argument, "But MLK was a criminal", meaning he had been in jail. On the other hand, frequently people say, "MLK was a plagiarist" or "MLK was a philanderer", and we'll be seeing more of "MLK laughed as he watched rapes". Those are a different fallacy, ad hominem, if the subject is, say, whether MLK was brave. We don't want to confuse that with the noncentral fallacy, which sounds a lot like it but is distinct. " https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
It is at least as eugenicist for the government to ban this. It is a declaration that it would be more optimal for some people to have Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis or lower IQ or whatever, when they otherwise wouldn't in a world where such therapies were available.
In fact, it is even more pernicious than the alternative, as it requires the state to restrict choice and bodily autonomy. In this sense, restrictions on gene therapy have more in common with the forced sterilizations associated with eugenics than anything else.
eugenics is incredibly obviously good if and only if in the specific form of “open free genehacking clinics on every street corner” where “free” means “it costs zero” and “anyone can enter there and ask for a genetic mod that their geneline will carry henceforth, selected on a catalog of every trait we know how to mod or do iterated embryo selection for”
inb4 “but not everybody would want to use them and then the people who haven’t been genehacked will be unfairly disadvantaged”: oh, so you want Fairness? ok, then sterilize everyone so that nobody will make kids without having thought at least once in their life about making kids or had an opportunity to choose which traits their kids will have
inb4 “but then it will become necessary to have certain genehacks to access certain things” yeah so? right now it is necessary to have certain partially-genetically-determined capabilities to do things, too; at least this scheme permits choosing
inb4 “but then there won’t be disabled people anymore”: Deaf people often want their kids to be Deaf. aspie people often want their kids to be aspie. there are even people who want kids with Down’s, and when i say EVERY TRAIT we know how to mod, I MEAN IT
inb4 “making fertility opt-in would enrage the trads who want people who fuck to be punished with kids they don’t want”: that is a feature, not a bug
inb4 “introducing a trivial inconvenience to fertility would prevent so much births that there wouldn’t be enough people to support the olds”: i’m counting on there being enough people who’d choose to mod for additional intelligence that they’d make fully automated luxury gay space communism happen
any other objection?
The argument against eugenics at the embryonic stage is that it reduces natural diversity due to groupthink about e.g. IQ, which is disadvantageous if it turns out that the narrower set of genetics you are producing has significant downsides or just isn't optimal compared to a wider set. Could be due to you not actually knowing downsides/optimality or due to unforseen changing of the environment. There are some conditions where it seems clear that there is no downside to eliminating them, and as long as the effect isn't significant at a population level (only the rich do it) then who cares, but when you are doing positive things like maxing out a life expectancy or IQ you do risk this sort of thing.
Here the argument of the piece was incredibly weak:
"When I think about these concerns, I consider the following thought experiment: suppose that I had a natural, unselected child, and that child became high school valedictorian and got into Harvard. Would my first reaction be “Oh no! This slightly raises her risk of anorexia!”?"
How about this, you gene select a child, they develop anorexia and drop out of school, would your first reaction be "awesome, that meant on expectation I made the best choice, just need more kids!!"
How is this different from environmental interventions?
That is, maybe teaching your kid to read is bad, since it decreases diversity, since otherwise there would be both literate and illiterate children, and maybe illiteracy is good in some way.
And also, if you taught your kid to read, and then they read a cult pamphlet and joined a cult and dropped out of school, would your first reaction be "awesome, teaching them to read was still a good idea in expectation!"
I think this is one of those cases where our common sense intuitions are good, and we use them for everything in near mode, and then we use a totally different set of crazy intuitions for things like new technology, where maybe all good things are bad and second-order effects dominate first-order ones. I think we should instead use our common-sense intuitions for the new technologies too.
In general why is modifying the genes of embryos different from environmental interventions? Inheritance to future generations and lack of the plasticity/changeability of the mind. A closer analogy would be environmental interventions on infants vs the elderly, higher standards of risk should be held for infants of course.
Yeah we should do good things, some of it is clearly good mainly because it is preventing obvious negative outcomes. The risk/reward for “IQ” modifications is less obvious to me and more likely to change with societal values and so on. You can take all the GMO monoculture ag arguments here as well.
Because we're going to have a fuckton of anorexics before we iron out the bugs for "gimme the higher IQ".
Beautiful theory, but nature does what it wants in practice, and in this case "in practice" means "a lot of experimental babies born so we can see where we're screwing up" but unlike lab rats, it's not (yet) permissible to euthanise the failed results.
The way it’s different from teaching your kid to read or filling the house with beautiful educational toys is that the benefits of these environmental goodies are not heritable. I don’t think selecting embryos for valued traits is ethically wrong, but I do wonder whether it might have unintended negative effects if it becomes common practice.
You know how you don’t like having visible upvotes in the comments? Well, I think selecting for traits is sort of like having visible upvotes.
Teaching kids to read and other educational interventions have had a profound effect that persists across generations and reshapes culture. Children taught to read will eventually teach their own children to read; better educated children tend to educate their own children as well. An educated population has a huge effect on society and could have unintended consequences.
I think you have a valid concern, but it doesn't come from a qualitative difference between embryo selection and other interventions. Rather it's about us having too much power to shape future generations. We would have the same worries if we invented some other way to radically change the personality or physiology (eg, some kind of incredibly effective 12 week training program). People would use this new training program to make their kids like most popular celebrity, reducing diversity in personality. Or maybe they'd use it to make their kids hardcore Republican/Democrat supporters. These kids would grow up and use the same intervention on their kids, perpetuating the change in society.
We want to have some power to affect the lives of our children. But too much power can be scary because it allows our mistakes to have permanent profound effects. New technologies are scary because they give us more power. It doesn't matter whether it's embryo selection or some almost magically effective training program; what matters is how powerful the technique is.
Yes, great point. To be perfectly honest, the thing I'm most concerned about when it comes to selecting for intelligence is that there is a certain kind of high intelligence that goes with being socially awkward, introverted, having trouble reading people and empathizing, inexpressiveness, fascination with patterns, etc. Of course many brilliant people do not have that autism lite thing going on, but what if the genes that get identified as high IQ genes are the ones that tend to produce the Aspergerish form of brilliance?
I am very very fond of quite a number of people of that kind, everybody from Oliver Sacks to many people here. I'm all for having more people who are that brilliant. At the same time, it doesn't seem like a plus for society to increase the number of people who are non-social, low-empathy, etc. It seems like more of what we *don't* need. We already have an ever-increasing portion of the "people" part of our lives filled with internet contact, fictional people in games, etc. and of course AI, which can already ape affection and admiration (though not very convincingly), and will soon learn to ape love and lust. How can it be good to increase the fraction of the population that is not terribly interested in other people?
Probably because of issues seen in animal breeding, where some genetic combinations that can get you to a desired phenotype are associated with genetic disorders, and the correlations wasn’t caught at first. For example, HYPP in Quarter Horses. https://www.tsln.com/news/hypp-and-the-impressive-line-of-american-quarter-horses-the-facts/ Essentially the disorder contributes to the desired phenotype.
“This constant flexing of the muscle cells is what leads to the pronounced muscle patterns on the afflicted horses, hence the popularity of the line in the stock horse breeds.”
I have heard concerns in human selection that some (not all) genes associated with high IQ are also associated with autism. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4927579/
Abstract is as follows,
“A suite of recent studies has reported positive genetic correlations between autism risk and measures of mental ability. These findings indicate that alleles for autism overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence, which appears paradoxical given that autism is characterized, overall, by below-average IQ. This paradox can be resolved under the hypothesis that autism etiology commonly involves enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence. This hypothesis is supported by convergent evidence showing that autism and high IQ share a diverse set of convergent correlates, including large brain size, fast brain growth, increased sensory and visual-spatial abilities, enhanced synaptic functions, increased attentional focus, high socioeconomic status, more deliberative decision-making, profession and occupational interests in engineering and physical sciences, and high levels of positive assortative mating. These findings help to provide an evolutionary basis to understanding autism risk as underlain in part by dysregulation of intelligence, a core human-specific adaptation. In turn, integration of studies on intelligence with studies of autism should provide novel insights into the neurological and genetic causes of high mental abilities, with important implications for cognitive enhancement, artificial intelligence, the relationship of autism with schizophrenia, and the treatment of both autism and intellectual disability.”
Broadly speaking, your geniuses have really really weird bodies, chemically speaking. Not terribly habitable for your normal infectious parasites.
Conversely, selecting against autism could be selecting against certain kinds of intelligence. Ideally these cancel each other out if you do both kinds of selection, so we neither end up with way too autistic people, nor way too dumb people, and I do expect the technology to have way more upsides than downsides, but we should be careful.
Except that’s not, in general, how it’s being marketed.
Right now we don’t have enough data to distinguish between IQ genes that increase autism risk and those that don’t.
And someone who is selecting for a high IQ baby probably is also someone who does not want to accept increased risk of autism.
The difference, very stark, is here you are manufacturing babies according to specifications. Treating human life as industrial product would lead to collapse of whatever "dignity of rational animal" that is left.
The specifications come from the combined individual decisions of a lot of separate humans trying to do something good. It is no different.
The animal breeders who care enough to actually evaluate the animals on these traits and pick the best, those people, they almost all genuinely care about the animals and want to breed them to be as good as possible. The people who do not care about their animals, puppy mills etc, also do not care about selecting their animals to have better traits and will just breed and sell as many as possible.
Take rabbits for example. Breeders of pet rabbits who want to improve the breed generally want to make them friendlier and cuter. And due to human perception, having a round face with a short nose is cuter. So breeders choose bunnies with round faces and short noses, and they are indeed very cute, but this is how Holland lops end up with tooth issues, because their mouths are not designed to fit into such a small space. Now, there is another combination of individual decisions breeders make - to compare their animals to those of other breeders in shows. Without this, the selection for shorter noses probably would not have gotten to such an extreme that it has a noticeable impact on health. Compare for instance Dutch rabbits, which do have shorter noses but not to such a ridiculous extreme.
With that background information out of the way, what do we make an analogy to? I would say the genetic testing companies are like the rabbit shows. Both have a very limited view of the situation - genetic testing companies can only see through the filter of a few genes with known effects, while judges at rabbit shows only spend a few minutes with each rabbit and do not get a chance to evaluate complex traits like personality or health. And both use that imperfect lens to decide which genes should be passed to the next generation.
(That being said, I'm still all in favor of selecting against gene variants with known highly negative effects. It's the positive selection that is easier to mess up, and even then, you can't do much harm within a single generation and by the time of the next one we'll have much better research.)
Gian, human dignity has gone out the window, only dumb old believers in the sky-fairy even hang on to that concept any more, and you don't want to be one of the dumb old sky-fairy believers, now do you? That would hold you back from all the fun things we all want to do!
So does selecting your mate. Should we just force a random function on all breading habits? Use your brain.
Robin Hanson might unironically say you have a point
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/beware-moral-confidence
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/libertarianism-as-deep-multiculturalism
This isn’t really a new technology concern. The issues being raised are as old as deliberate animal breeding. Selection sometimes pulls along things other than what you are intentionally selecting for.
Common sense intuitions from animal breeders would be that avoiding deleterious mutations is pretty safe, and positive selection of desired traits needs to consider the whole organism, not just individual measurements.
For example, some high IQ genes appear to also increase autism risk. In horses, selection for muscling resulted in inadvertent selection for HYPP, a genetic defect. Just looking at one trait can lead you astray.
The diversity discussed is GENETIC diversity, or range of options in the gene pool. Various versions of genes are called alleles. Literacy is not an allele. Alleles can provide immunity to a specific disease or provide other adaptive advantages.
You can see the genetic marks of old plagues in populations from the increased frequency of protective alleles to those diseases.
Great reply.
But this is not a real objection, unless you also object to the idea of people selecting their individual sexual partners. Characteristics like height, physical fitness, intelligence, lack of deformities, et al. are attractive precisely because they predict fitness in offspring. It's a cruder method, but we still practice it. Your logic would have us select sexual partners at random, just in case we were discounting some hidden yet important gene - though a gene pertaining especially to short, unfit, unintelligent people is unlikely to be particularly salubrious.
Choosing a partner allows for observation of the outcome rather than prediction. And after partner-choosing there is the randomness of inheritance that we are discussing.
But the big one is that we cannot all choose the same partner. If you proposed that every child was fathered by either the Super Bowl MVP or a Nobel laureate, I would also object that we are losing genetic diversity. The current system does indeed allow for many relatively short fat stupid people to procreate and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Are you saying that people's choice in partners is not based in selection? That they do not select for traits that predict selective advantage for their offspring? I'm afraid I cannot agree with this. You discount an entire field of evolutionary theory.
Inheritance may be somewhat at random, but in any case the difference in question is one of degree, not function. It is not *entirely* at random, because observations concerning genetics become more accurate at the general, not the specific, level. Once we are talking about the group level, genetic prediction can be extremely accurate. And at the individual level, one has only to go back a few generations to make fairly accurate predictions about a given person's traits. This is necessary in animal breeding, for example, and humans do not function differently on a biological level.
What inherent advantage do you believe random 'diversity' to possess? A proliferation of disadvantageous traits may be legal, even morally acceptable, and still have deleterious effects. Because we do not force people into relationships, humans naturally have a tendency to pair themselves with partners whose traits are the best they can manage to obtain. No one is actually choosing short, stupid, fat people as a primary option in our society because they understand genetically on some level that these are traits which are disadvantageous. The consequences of sexual selection have much more to do with the genetic makeup of population groups than random drift. This was well established by Fisher (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection).
Whatever process affects the genetic makeup of the population is "selection". It's a tautological concept. We are moving on the contiuum between "natural" selection where that process is mostly determined by "nature" meaning physical environmental factors and access to mates/survivability, through selection due to societal-psychological factors and associative mating based on "who do I think has the best traits", into a potential territory where genetics might be shaped by intellectual intent and design.
But yes, eugenics based not on embryo selection or gene-level mapping/modeling/prediction, but rather on intellectually intentional mating practices, espeically when applied at the population level, also seems bad. Of course that is the traditional way to do it and it's probably much more powerful at this point in the technology. It seems that most in this discussion want to run away from connecting this treatment with "breeding humans" so interesting that you embrace it. Producing the human equivalent of the English bulldog is exactly the fear.
Genetic diversity in a gene pool is strongly correlated with the health of that gene pool and its odds of long-term survival.
Pretty good discussion at https://www.usgs.gov/news/why-genetic-diversity-important
All breading habits across all mammals are not random at all, they exist specifically to improving genetic outcomes. Just most people are bottom feeders so they get the best they can.
we aren't selecting partners eugenically, though. It's individual love. We'd mock anyone who did if they'd admit it, because its dehumanizing.
"I adore Jeremy. He has such beautiful eyes!"
"I couldn't possibly date Steve; he's cross-eyed and short."
we call this "being shallow" in Narnia.
dehumanizing is reducing people to traits like a pair of pretty eyes.
"making fertility opt-in would enrage the trads who want people who fuck to be punished with kids they don’t want”
Ah, *that's* what I want, and not because I think abortion is murder! Well, nice that you know what I believe better than I do, thanks for opening my eyes!
If you're an example of someone who hasn't been "dehumanized", I'd hate to see what less human people talk like.
Maybe get down from your high horse and take a look in the mirror before talking to me from your false virtue. I may be using ugly words to insult you but only as a response to your attempt at defaming an entire group of people by deliberately simplifying a complex topic to misrepresent their intentions. You’re just another wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Whatever you say, extremely weird person who thinks casual sex destroys human integrity and clumps of cells are people.
Who said anything about a moral loophole? Some people have no moral issue with the elimination of an embryo. That would make them morally consistent.
But of course, you mean that *your* morality is the correct one. That's an argument that I have no interest in pursuing.
Blurring the intrinsic value of human life at the embryonic stage is a loophole to morally justify killing that person before their personhood is directly evident.
See, there you go again: using phrases like "the intrinsic value of human life." (What value? How intrinsic? Whose human?)
Not everyone agrees with your moral perspective. That doesn't make their arguments "moral loopholes" - it makes them at variance with yours.
We're stuck with questions of morality, though, because this opens the door to the dream of social engineering.
We want the future generations to be the best. But what is the best? Well, that they'll have the qualities we value and the values we think correct.
But it's hard to forecast what the society of fifty to a hundred years hence could or will be like. If we had this tech in the 1950s, the qualities and values that were self-evidently correct would be "now there will be no more perversion, we can do away with homosexuality". Today, we have Pride parades.
What will be the Pride parades of 2075? What will be the optimum human for those days? We need to be a little more humble before deciding the future is blue-eyed blondes (that didn't go so well the last time it was tried) and engineering our children to fit.
a) That was pointlessly cruel
b) If you look at Deseach's comments, you will find that you have just insulted an ally or near-ally.
You’re right, i jumped the gun. I’m the retarded one.
Many Thanks! Best wishes.
Banned for this comment.
Okay, so, one of the standard "proofs" from the pro-abortion side that the pro-life side's revealed preferences don't match their rhetoric is that pro-lifers rarely protest IVF (the ultimate topic at hand), even though it creates 5-10x as many aborted viable embryos as a single abortion.
I ask this out of genuine curiosity, because I assume you've at least thought about this, what is your personal opinion there?
Watch me smile like a shark as I pull my Roman Catholicism card out of my sleeve.
Got you covered right there, fam. We don't approve of IVF (and indeed, I caused personal pain to another former commenter on here, which I do regret, by expressing that in a previous debate about the topic).
https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/reproductive-technology/begotten-not-made-a-catholic-view-of-reproductive-technology
Well, I can appreciate the moral consistency.
I'm still curious about your opinions on the magnitude of it. Would you say it is as bad as 5 to 10 "regular" abortions, or is there some sort of mitigating discount rate?
Or is comparing the magnitude of sins at all a fool's errand? I don't recall seeing whether you've ever expressed an opinion on utilitarianism in general.
Edit: Also, is any of this affected by the previous pope's declaration that unborn children can go to heaven instead of limbo?
>Or is comparing the magnitude of sins at all a fool's errand?
Wild guess (I find deities implausible), but I think most followers of many religions put that judgement in their deity's hands.
How long is a piece of string? Is one torture-rape-kill murder equivalent to five or to ten ordinary one-punch murders?
It's all bad.
Now, there is a distinction between venial and mortal sins, which is a whole discussion of theology on its own, but I'll just drop a quick quote from "The Screwtape Letters":
"You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts".
Deiseach you are truly irrepressible! I'm glad our faith has a representative like you here in the commentariat.
God help us all if I'm taken as a representative of Catholicism, except maybe in the "see, we're not an organised religion!" sense.
Well, we are all sick and in need of the heavenly physician, I suppose.
One possibility is that a small amount of a trait is good, but efforts to eliminate the bad, severe cases are bad. A little bipolar gets you artists, severe bipolar ruins lives.
A possibly hard case-- there's a gene which, when homozygous, gives immunity to AIDS. The piece of the immune system that AIDS hooks on to just isn't there. This means the person is a little less healthy in general. Worth it? Worth it going forward?
Good example!
If I were expecting highly effective embryo selection to happen instantly (and I were young enough to live to see the effects), I'd worry about an "arms race" on traits like height (a race to the top? :-) ) which is, to an extent, zero-sum. As it is, I think too much else (AI, of course) will happen first.
The only acceptable answer to "But then there won't be disabled people anymore" is "Good." I can think of few better indictments of libertarianism than the idea that people should be able to choose to make their kids disabled on purpose.
That sounds uncharitable to me. If we have the technical ability to prevent certain traits that we might be considered disabilities, then *someone* has to decide which such traits (if any) are actually disabilities that should be prevented. I'm not sure that parents are always the right someones, but it's not obvious to me that government is the right someone, either.
That goes double if we can't be sure of side-effects — where we're not just preventing a putative disability but also imposing unknown and potentially unknowable risks. (E.g., maybe it'll turn out that knocking out a certain gene eliminates the risk of nearsightedness but doubles the risk of breast cancer.) *Someone* has to make that call.
I certainly agree with the "someone has to decide" issue being an issue, but some decisions are easier than others.
The government already steps in when parents reach the "now you're taking the piss" level of clearly not acting in their children's best interests, that's what child protection is for. I can't think of a more obvious case than wanting your child to be disabled. At the very least, parents should not be allowed to actively select for it.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a libertarian, and actually I don't think that the view you've attributed to libertarianism *is* exactly libertarian — in my experience libertarians tend to be more concerned with children's rights vis-à-vis parents than the reverse — but regardless, I'll try to convince you that this issue is harder than you think.)
The comment that you initially replied to gave two examples where putatively disabled parents might want their kids to have the same putative disability: Deaf people, and people on the lighter end of the autistic spectrum. Those are really good examples, so I'll stick to those.
The reason I say "putatively disabled" and "putative disability" is that Deaf people and autistic people often *don't* consider themselves to be disabled, or consider themselves to be "disabled" only insofar as the surrounding society chooses not to accommodate them. Many Deaf people choose not to get cochlear implants in part because they belong to Deaf culture, their Deafness is part of their identity, and they don't want to assimilate into non-Deaf culture. Likewise, many autistic people view autism as part of their personalities and identity, and they would regard with horror the notion of having their personalities — their very selves — changed by making them be allistic instead. (Imagine if someone offered to make you autistic. Partly you might be horrified because you consider autism to be a disability, but mostly I think you'd be horrified just because it would make you a different person.)
So the question is: should a government official be empowered to step in and say "That's cute and all, but no, the way you are is *bad* and a *problem*, and you can't have kids with the *problem* of being like you?"
If your answer to that is "yes, (s)he should be empowered to step in and say that", then: how about Black people? There are obvious advantages to having lighter skin (at least in most Western countries); I'm guessing that you don't consider Blackness to a "disability", but if a government official is tasked with preventing parents from having disabled kids, why shouldn't (s)he come in with a ream of data about poorer outcomes for darker-skinned people and say "I'm sorry, but objectively, darker skin is a disability"?
It's natural and commonplace for a privileged majority to assume that their own culture is objectively correct, and implicitly (or explicitly) disregard minority cultures as lacking value. There's no shortage of historical cases of majorities "rescuing" children from minority cultures seen as inferior (countless Native Americans and First Nations in the US and Canada, Aborigines in Australia, Christians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews in Turkestan, etc., etc., etc.). You feel that Deafness and Asperger are disabilities and should be eliminated — OK — but how certain are you, how confident? How much do you, *can* you, trust yourself in that judgment? How much can you trust your government in that judgment?
The disadvantages of being deaf are not socially constructed the way the major disadvantages of being black obviously are. If tomorrow each of us was transported alone to the middle of the jungle and had to try to survive, no social perception of deafness would have any effect on deaf people's inherent disadvantage in being unable to hear a predator behind them, or potential prey hiding from view. The only way deafness can ever stop being a disability is for us to somehow construct a utopian world where nobody ever experiences a negative outcome as a result of lacking a sense of hearing ever again.
There's a lot more room for nuance when it comes to things like autism, though low-functioning autism is pretty clearly disabling too. But if you can't agree that something as obviously disabling as deafness is in fact objectively a disability (or that there even is such a thing as objective disability), I fundamentally can't take you seriously.
(Incidentally, I was not referring only to people who identify as "libertarians", who tend to be free market extremists, but the general principle of libertarianism, which is to say highly prioritizing freedom of choice as a moral value. I was a bit inflammatory about it because I lean heavily towards prioritizing public health & safety so a lot of my disagreements with others come from being less libertarian than they are. I don't know if there's a better term for that with fewer strings attached; "liberal" certainly isn't it.)
It doesn't. But it's positive, not negative eugenics
It’s absolutely eugenics.
They are just going to redefine what that word means - you know that, right?
It's fairly straightforward. The word is derived from ancient Greek: eu - genes, meaning "good" and "born, come into being."
Not much to define. Unless you're talking about negative attributions which have nothing to do with actual definitions, of course.
That's not how words work. If it were, then "jaunty" and "gentle" would be synonyms (both from French "gentil"), as would "isolate" and "insulate", "diamond" and "adamant", "metal" and "mettle", etc., etc., etc.
I see. What's your definition of eugenics, if not "the process of being born well (i.e. genetic improvement)" ?
Merriam-Webster defines it as "the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations' genetic composition" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/eugenics), which sounds about right to me.
Note that it specifies several elements not clear from the Greek roots, e.g. "human" (and not, say, selecting for meatier chickens) and "populations" (and not, say, an individual choosing not to have biological kids because they have a condition they don't want to risk passing on).
I'm not sure whether population-scale embryo selection would count as "selective breeding" for purposes of this definition, if every couple is allowed to procreate but not to choose which of their embryos is used. That technology wasn't available when the eugenics movement was in ascendance, so it didn't come up; we'll have to see if the term ends up including it. (Cf. "phone"; if you could explain all the different kinds of 2025 computer to someone living in 1940, I don't think they'd guess that any of them would be called "phones", let alone exactly which ones would and wouldn't.)
Apparently by your definition so is masturbation 2 days before trying to inceminate lol. I'm euginically eliminating the most aged sperm in favor of a fresher sample.
Good eugenics.
it doesn't involve the use of a cute blond chick. Eugenics is insisting in a sexy voice... I have goood genes!! And then the camara pans to her pants...
Chicks rock
We're about to see some weird generational cycles.
Every generation one trait will get optimized to the point of oversaturation, and the next generation will find its comparative advantage by selecting for a different mix of traits.
Strong disagree.
If you mean "saturated" in the sense of up to the theoretical maximum, that means nobody ever gets cancer, heart disease, or obesity, and everyone's a genius. Why would you select for a different mix of traits than that next time?
If you mean "saturated" in the sense of up to some current level of technology, the current level of technology is changing much faster than the generational cycle. I expect genetic technologies to be much better than this within ten years.
I mean in things like height vs. IQ Vs. schizoid tendencies.
I know they're not up to there yet.
I'm mostly saying that I think in a world of designer babies, there won't be a static target.
One can expect that "compatibility with cybernetic implants" will be a goal too once they become mainstream.
If everyone's a genius, no-one is.
Make it so everyone gets that 6 point IQ boost, and now the 100 IQ people are 106 IQ and the 120 IQ people are 126 IQ. That sounds great, but now we have to renorm all the tests so now the 106ers are the new 100 IQ.
It might be a better world. Or it might be just more of the same, where the rich and smart get richer and the rest of us pick up the crumbs.
IIUC, the extremely rich are not generally those with extremely high IQ. It's more the "moderately rich". The extremely rich are generally those who start off rich and focus on getting richer. They may have only an average IQ, but they hire people to do things that require such a characteristic.
I think that's pretty obviously an all-boats-lifted scenario. Sure, people's individual experience of whether society treats them as "smart" is just going to do the treadmill thing you're describing, and I certainly wouldn't expect it to particularly help inequality. But, pretty much every job on the planet would get performed just a little bit better here and there.
Yeah, but we're already performing "a little bit better" compared to previous generations and eras, and we're still complaining.
The smarter world will do a little bit better than us, but that will be the new normal, so now people will complain about how it takes a whole two minutes for their customer service problems to be solved.
Human social status remains and will remain a zero-sum game, so there will always be complaining, even if no one dies of hunger anymore and the average person is way better off than 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. It's laughable that some think genetic engineering will erase racial IQ gaps: families with a higher average will simply "keep their lead" by further increasing their progeny's IQ.
I'm not sure it's zero-sum. As societal complexity increases, so does the number of independent status ladders. The guy who's laughed at by his neighbors for living in his parents' basement at thirty, is maybe renowned for his on-line gaming prowess in other circles.
Are we having better lives than Homo erectus? 100=>106 is just that difference, but much smaller in size.
Not only would you be less likely to be dangerously stupid, you would get to reap the benefits of being in a society where people around you are dangerously stupid.
Intelligence is not a purely positional good. It wasn't a purely positional good last time we had this talk, either.
Hard lines on those of us who are already dangerously stupid! Should we be removed from society (and perhaps existence itself) for the sake of the less dangerously stupid?
I'm not a death penalty supporter, but I do support prison for violent criminals, and I support institutionalization for those committing crimes because they can't connect their actions to their consequences. That does amount to removing them from society.
We're at least agreed on opposition to the death penalty, maybe there's hope for world peace yet!
We might be aiming for eliminating cancer and heart disease and obesity today, but once we've done that we're going to have different goals.
More creativity, maybe, or cybernetics compatibility, or a sense of justice- any number of things
I recall that Damon Knight once wrote a story where this happened. One character mentions that having beautiful children is like playing the stock market, you have to guess how beauty standards will change in the future.
Imagine if we'd had this technology in the 80s and 90s. It would be a net win for society because of increased intelligence and decreased mental illness. But you'd have to take a moment to pity all the poor white women whose parents selected them to have small butts!
I hope someone can find the name of the story. It sounds more like Silverberg to me, but I'm guessing.
By any chance, John Brunner's The Stone That Never Came Down?
I think facial beauty standards remain quite consistent throughout time. For female body, I grant you that there's shifting standards that might also vary geographically.
IIUC, that's already happened in China, where people selected for male offspring. (Perhaps that's happened elsewhere, too.) So far, however, the number who could afford the treatment has been a small enough proportion to avoid most of the bad effects.
I'm type 1, not type 2, but... I'd have to think about it, at $27,000? I mean, it's probably worth it, but I might put it off a few years.
Huh, if you don't mind me asking, what is your income/net worth? And how much do you + your insurance spend on diabetes care per year?
I don't have super consistent income yet and I could probably pull together $27K for something really important but it wouldn't be, like, remotely easy. My parents mostly pay my medical expenses but my guess is the copays are probably something on the order of $1000 per year, and the vast majority of that is continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps (which aren't strictly necessary), the insulin itself is like $10 for a 90 day supply I think? No idea what the insurance is company is paying.
Okay, that makes sense. In the post, I said the claim required that "you’re well-off enough that these aren’t impossible sums of money for you", and I was referring to people with Type 2 who tend to be in their 40s and 50s and so probably richer than you. I'll edit "impossible" to "extraordinary".
Strongly agree. I have Type 1 as well, but am in my 40’s and fairly well off. I’d pay >>$100k to get rid of it. Not pay excruciating attention to how much I’m eating would be amazing.
FWIW, I'm type 2 diabetic, but I control it by diet so officially I'm "not currently diabetic" (which is because of a silly definition, not because of remission).
I might pay $5,000 for a complete cure. (If you'd asked me a decade ago, I would probably have been willing to pay more. If you'd asked me in the first year after diagnosis, I'd probably have agreed to the $27,000.)
I think that's fair. If you had gotten the cure for $27k as soon as you were diagnosed you would have saved yourself a huge amount of effort, time, and cost learning and working to manage the condition. Now, you would benefit from the instant cure but you'd never get that time and effort back.
The good news is that I don’t think your 50k number is correct anymore from Herasight. They might reach out and correct you, and we might see just how quickly capitalism brings down costs for technologies like this
I asked Herasight the day before yesterday. They said it was still their most recent number, but that they hope to get it lower in the near future, and that people with unusual situations could ask them for a custom quote that might be less.
Oh, I should probably tell you something: type 1 diabetes is one of the most tractable conditions with gene editing. We can lower the risk by >50% with a few edits. It's actually quite unusual in this way. Conditions like schizophrenia or ADHD involve far more genes with much smaller effects.
Not so with type 1.
And because type 1 has such an earlier age of onset compared with other "highly editable" conditions like Alzheimer's or breast cancer, it's a strong candidate to be one of the first conditions we edit for. We'll be able to demonstrate within ~5 years or so that it actually works.
I think early editing tech is probably going to be roughly on par with the cost of the more expensive embryo selection companies (possibly a bit cheaper), so it's possible cost will still be an issue.
But it's worth noting you can at least lower the cost of egg retrieval by doing it abroad. You can do egg retrieval in the Czech Republic for $3000-$4000, in Spain for $6000, and in Vietnam for $2000. And while I can't really vouch for the quality of specific clinics, the expected cost per child is almost certainly lower than for US clinics.
If you're interested in talking about embryo editing for type one, drop me an email at genesmithlesswrong@gmail.com
Scott, you say: "rich people get first crack at every new technology, but poor people usually follow close behind... Also, it would be crazy for any forward-thinking government not to cover this."
That's reassuring for the classic concern that this tech could, over generations, create genetically-stratified socioeconomic classes *within* a country.
But across countries, still seems like things are gonna get really weird, like "ok now there are *actually* significant genetic differences in IQ across countries". Seems like an important downside.
Especially because presumably this wouldn't work on unplanned pregnancies, which are strongly stratified by socioeconomic class.
You would only be one generation "behind" the rest of your country if you had an unselected pregnancy. Probably a wash if we're looking at the impact over multiple generations.
I'm actually a bit more optimistic because there are so many interventions left in developing countries that could raise IQ significantly more cost-effectively than embryo selection. The $/IQ point cost effectiveness for LEAP is orders of magnitude more than that of embryo selection. So I would actually expect to see the gap close in coming years, even if embryo selection is widely adopted.
In the long run, my hope is developing countries can just get a lot richer, and IVF + embryo selection can get cheaper. At some point those two lines will cross. Our job is to increase the slope of both curves.
Unlike wealthy countries, where correlation between fertility and IQ is zero or weak-negative, it's very negative in many poor countries and their brightest are likely to emigrate to rich countries; as environmental gap shrinks, genetic grows...
What's LEAP?
Maybe they meant LEEP, the Lead Exposure Elimination Project: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fd96FtLFACeAshqJP/introducing-leep-lead-exposure-elimination-project
Sorry, I meant to say LEEP, the lead exposure elimination project
I am mostly of the opinion that a scenario where country A has IQ 100 and country B has IQ 120 is worse than a scenario where they're both 120 but better than a scenario where they're both 100. I think equality is nice, but not so nice that you should burn down all the houses to give everyone equally good tents.
I do have some concerns that relative advantages can be exploited to get away with evil crap, but we already have some pretty big relative advantages along other axes and the results have not so far convinced me that it's worthwhile to outright destroy value just for more equality, except in some special cases like literal weapons (e.g. treaties that put limits on how many nukes each country can have).
I think there's a somewhat wider range of scenarios where it's good to _redistribute_ some of the value (e.g. progressive tax), compared to destroying it. So hypothetically maybe it would be good if there were a global policy of higher-IQ countries paying some aid to lower-IQ countries.
("But they'd never agree to that!" "Oh, but you think they'd agree to voluntarily lowering their IQs instead?")
Agreed
Well, it seems there are already genetically stratified socioeconomic classes in many countries. India is undeniably one example, with many Middle Eastern countries being pretty slam dunk too. Even in America, Charles Murray and others like Raj Chetty make the case that there has been cognitive stratification correlating with income for at least a century. China seems more even than most high-achieving countries in this regard.
You underestimate our ability to stick our heads in the sand about IQ differences. Those who wish to do that will do it just the same as they do today.
All I can say is if I was inclined to do this sort of thing and I already had kids I'd be asking the company to test the existing kids too to calibrate how seriously to take the predictions.
I don't think you can get that much from this.
First, your kids probably don't have prostate cancer yet. And child IQ is pretty weakly correlated with adult IQ, and the predictors are for the latter.
Second, it's hard to get good intuitions for statistics, but I think even a somewhat valuable predictor can have a high error rate. If I'm reading the widget on Herasight's site correctly, if you have five embryos and use their IQ predictor with supposed +6 IQ point gains, there's still only a 73% chance that your child born using their predictor will be smarter than an average child born without it. So if you "test" their product and find that actually your unselected kid is smarter than your selected kid, this doesn't prove very much in a scientific sense - it's the chance of two coin flips both landing heads.
Maybe a better tactic would be for them to test you, the adult (since you might have gotten some diseases, and you know your adult IQ). Then you only have the latter problem (sample size of one). So you should get them to test lots of different adults. But then you're back at "this works in large studies", which is how they validated them in the first place!
I've had Nucleus and Herasight genetically test me. There wasn't very much useful on there. For example, I have obsessive compulsive disorder. Nucleus said that I had slightly-higher-than-average genetic risk of OCD, which put me at 2.6% compared to the overall population's 2.3%. Is this good (because it identified higher-than-average risk)? Is it bad (because it gave me only 2.6% chance of a condition which I, in fact, have)? I'm not sure, and I think the real answer is to not pretend that you can conclude much from a single data point in a heavily probabilistic domain.
Herasight did also test my two existing children, but I found I couldn't bear to look at the results. We agreed that my wife would look at the results and agreed to let me know if there was anything actionable. But AFAIK they used the information internally to get a better picture of my and my wife's DNA to predict our future children, but forgot to send it to us. I plan to remind them about it when I get around to it.
Get them to test you vs your adult siblings? lol
This whole thing really smells of “amulet to defend against leopards” - there are no leopards, so clearly it works!
It’s functionally impossible for me to confirm the service achieves what it says it does, and even in the best possible world the effects are so tiny I am unlikely to see them; and when I don’t, well, what did I expect? - the dice don’t often roll all sixes, guess I just got unlucky, LOL cha-ching.
Meanwhile, their margins will be even better if instead of doing any work they just hook an RNG up to the numbers in their report - you can’t even start to check the statistics for a couple of decades, while the half life of a startup is measured in single digit years! - and even if you literally go to their lab and look over their shoulder, since in the long run Moloch says everything that can be enshittified will be enshittified, the fact they had not yet done this when you checked has only a limited bearing on how much I can trust them by the time I get around to using the service. Net result: a generation of Silicon Valley neophiles using their cellphones to call the local shaman to help pick embryos.
Imagine, ten years from now, there are lots of these startups and also just as many of the sort that just make up numbers, and everything in between. How do you tell which one to go with, or where on that spectrum any particular one lies, given only their marketing material?
The situation feels somewhere between buying a lottery ticket and one of those deeds for land on the moon: there is some tiny chance it might pay off, but realistically, you’ve probably spent your money on a worthless bit of paper.
When does IQ change? Turn from "child" to "adult"?
Exactly on one's 18th birthday, of course. Unless you live in Alabama, then it is on the 19th birthday.
This sounds like the perfect opportunity for scammers. After all, how do you prove a negative? "Your child hasn't got prostate cancer yet". Yeah, and by the time they're in the age bracket to get it, they either do get it or they don't.
If they don't, the scammer company (which did not, in fact, select out embryos) can say "Told you it works". If they do, well, that's forty-plus years in the future. The company may not still exist. Or they can pull statistical fine print out of the air to say "Ah, we never said they'd *never* get prostate cancer, we just said this would reduce the risk. Not our fault some risk remained and they got unlucky!"
You make my stony black heart want to set up a dodgy clinic promising the gullible and desperate that I'll give them superbabies, when it's bog-standard IVF, I pocket the dough and flee to Switzerland, and it's their problem if the kids get health difficulties etc. in later life.
That's a real problem. It's a real technology, that really ought to work if done properly, but it's a lot easier to lie, and it may take multiple decades for your lies to be proven. And when the lie *is* proven, most of the evidence for "who was responsible" will be gone, so the court case may be impossible. (Or, by then, the scammer may be dead of old age.)
> that really ought to work if done properly
...where by "work" we mean if everything goes /perfectly/ we see a single digit percentage effect in statistics across the entire population measured several decades later, rather than anything specific in particular that any person actually paying for the service could point to.
Don't even need deliberate lying, as of yet there's a lot of room for "oops, didn't work out as we thought it would, genuine error, well them's the breaks, that's the way the cookie crumbles, hey at least your baby has the right number of eyes and hands, okay?"
The "oops!" is a different problem. Yeah, it's a real one, but it's a different one. (Well, except that with over-promising they blend into each other around the edges.)
Whether they select or not, very ease to prove, because they have to give customers these genomes data and after child is born you can check if child's genome matches the selected one.
And what are you gonna do if the baby doesn't match up? "Excuse me, I wish to return this deficient item, here's the receipt"?
Sure, this is what American law courts are for, but good luck arguing statistical probability there against company lawyers who are pleading "you shoulda read the fine print, there's no guarantees in biology".
Are we talking about the prostate cancer that supposedly most men develop if they live long enough?
“ Herasight did also test my two existing children, but I found I couldn't bear to look at the results.”
It would be worthwhile exploring why this is so.
(Just using 2.6% chance as a generic chance and anorexia as a generic condition) Is it because
- if you found out a child had a 2.6% chance of anorexia, you regret not having had the chance to lower it to 2.3%
- if you found out an existing child had a 2.6% chance of anorexia, it will have been in some sense unfair on them that your third child has a lower chance
- you will regret knowing that your existing child has a 2.6% chance of anorexia versus 2.3% chance on average and having to deal with the consequences of anorexia in the future
- you will regret knowing one existing child has a 2.6% chance of getting anorexia and the other has only a 2.3% chance and that will influence how you treat your two children
I can definitely imagine ‘not being able to look’ but not having kids myself I’m not sure why it is.
"Herasight did also test my two existing children, but I found I couldn't bear to look at the results."
Presumptuous of me to say this, but I am very glad you didn't. You acted like a father, not someone purchasing from a breeder who wants to check the pups are indeed the pedigree claimed.
Super interesting developments, somehow, after a slow start, the 21st century does pick up steam after all.
But with regard to
> To have a sense of why society works the way it does, instead of feeling like you’re being blown back and forth by institutions you don’t really understand?
Would not institutions become more complex at the same rate that general intelligence increases?
Good question. I don't know. Do countries with very high IQ (like China) have noticeably more complicated institutions than those with very low IQ? I'm not sure (and insofar as they do, I'm not sure if it has more to do with IQ or wealth or stability). See also my recent https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about-aborigines post for some discussion of whether "primitive" cultures have more or less complex institutions.
Yeah that's a good point, maybe it's more about a "ceiling" of institutional complexity than about the average institution.
For the Aborigines, I wonder if they could have managed to maintain an even more complicated section system if they had an average IQ of 120 or so.
Well, the Pirahã of the Amazon don't have words for numbers, and they have no abstract terms for colors (they'd describe something red as "like blood"). Yet they seem to have words for every plant and animal species in their environment with the uses and dangers of each (if any). Considering the biodiversity of the Amazonian rain forest, that's quite an accomplishment. Probably they'd have trouble with Raven's Progressive Matrices test because they don't really have words for shapes, and they're not trained to recognize the abstractions (in fact, John C. Raven recommended that his test wouldn't be suitable for populations without formal systems of schooling—can't find the quote now, though).
Are you saying they have words of hundreds of thousands species, including those that require a microscope to tell them apart?
There's plenty of low IQ populations under obligatory schooling systems.
No. But they're foragers, and like any good naturalist, they can recognize all the plants and animals they encounter in their environment. Upon further digging, their designations seem to be general descriptions—e.g., "the plant whose bark gives visions." This is similar to the Inuit "words" for snow, which are really agglutinative descriptions, e.g., "snow that is slushy and granular".
Identifying all the plants in our environment without the help of a phone app is more than most of us can do. "Oh, that's some sort of tree. I think it's an oak."
They have nothing else to do in jungle. There are their relatives (South America is very undiverse genetically) receiving education and they get much lower than 100. In USA, Blacks have nothing which could tie them to preindustrial societies, but score lower. And Inuit are above US Blacks or Native Americans.
US rural whites score better than US urban blacks on IQ tests, and know much more animals and plants, does it make rural whites smarter than urban blacks?
I think you have to have a high IQ to be able to learn to read and write in a system with no alphabet and thousands of possible grammatically valid characters.
Don’t assume it, come and look! The answer is: lots of very average and dumb Chinese people are literate, so no, intelligence is not required for literacy in a non-alphabetic system.
600 characters is about what's needed for literacy. (they combine, so there's more words).
https://www.thatsmandarin.com/blog/how-many-chinese-characters-do-i-need/
Japan goes with about 2100 (these are taught in school), with around a thousand as taught in elementary school.
You definitely need more than 600 characters to be functionally literate. There’s a misleading figure that says 600 gets you to 80% recognition, but this is at the character level. If you didn’t recognize 1 out of 5 English words on a page you’d have trouble understanding many sentences and paragraphs, even with guessing from context. I visited China while I only knew 600 or so characters and was definitely not “functionally literate.” I didn’t really start to feel able to read the language in a fluent, useful way till I hit 1500-2000 characters. In Japan they get away with fewer characters because they supplement with kana (syllabaries) and kanji are a bit more overloaded than hanzi.
For what it's worth, it might be true that China has more complicated institutions than the West. When my family member emigrated from China, they were enormously relieved at the amount of bribery and favor-trading they no longer had to do to acquire basic goods and services
I suppose one could argue that the complexity of human institutions has been correlated with the general rise in IQ in all regions of the world over the past century. But I think a better explanation is that the World's GDP has multiplied 4.5x in the past 50 years. More types of gizmos are being manufactured. More companies to make the gizmos. More paperwork (now electronic) to track the gizmo logistics etc. Plus, companies have gone multinational, which requires more workers and whole new systems to deal with dozens of regulatory regimes, etc.
I joined Cisco in 1998. I was at the bottom of the organizational tree, but there were only four levels of management between me and the CEO (John Chambers). When I left Cisco in 2002, there were ten levels between me and John Chambers. The organization had burgeoned with our product space. New systems were implemented to deal with the new complexity of the organization. This definitely had nothing to do with changes in IQ and the timeline was too short to have been affected by the Flynn Effect.
Generational intelligence has been increasing by ~3 pts per decade in the US. Our institutions are definitely more complex than they were when IQ started being measured a century ago. But probably that increase can't be attributed to increased IQ. I doubt if US citizens are any smarter than they were a century ago.
That ~3 has little sense because it depends on which IQ test is used; Raven's matrices show larger improvement while arithmetic is barely up. It's also that were no large-scale studies of modern people on 100 year old tests; it's extrapolation.
Then why do they keep renormalizing them every 10 to 20 years?
But your statement is incorrect. the Flynn Effect has affected all the major IQ tests. However it seems to have plateaued in the US and Scandinavian countries in 00s and 10s.
It affected all tests, but to a wildly different degrees, the 1st picture on wikipedia page about it makes it obvious.
If population improved 10 points on test A, then improved 10 points on test B, then improved 10 points on test C, it doesn't mean it improved 30 points on test A.
Flynn compared the raw scores (not normalized IQs) of people tested in different eras but taking the *same* version of the test. Someone taking the 1950 version in 1980 would score significantly higher than the 1950 average because the test hadn't been renormed. Flynn did not claim that people were getting smarter. And as you can see from the chart you referenced, the average increase in all 5 performance subsets (across various IQ tests) was ~3 pts per decade, which also closely matches the upward trend in FSIQ. RPM is the only actual IQ test mentioned on that chart (and ironically, it improved the most, even though it's supposedly the least culturally and educationally biased measure of intelligence).
And I very much doubt that people are getting smarter, even though raw "intelligence" (whatever the f**k that is) is improving.
Does it make any sense to very different values in range from 0 to 6 to 3? They are not just random tries of same experiment, they are different scales.
>And I very much doubt that people are getting smarter, even though raw "intelligence" (whatever the f**k that is) is improving.
in terms of IQ-ists: the improvements are not on 'g'.
As one would expect looking at IQ and fertility correlation.
Update:
But in the US, the Flynn effect seems to have not only plateaued in the 00s, but was trending downward in the 10s. Not sure if this trend is continuing in the 20s.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289623000156
They might do. But (1) if you magically (or technologically) make your children a bit cleverer then the effect on their ability to navigate institutional complexity is much larger than the effect on actual institutional complexity, and (2) if it's true that societies of smarter people have more complex institutions, that's probably because they're getting benefits from those more complex institutions sufficient to justify their complexity.
Still reading but this part stands out:
"Also, it would be crazy for any forward-thinking government not to cover this; it could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in future health care expenses. In countries with public health care, this comes directly out of the government treasury; even in the US, it’s covered by Medicare after age 65. The government should be begging people to select embryos."
A good test case for how this could roll out is genetic screening for stuff like cystic fibrosis, where there's a well understood genetic cause and it can be screened in infants (1).
From a very quick review, Medicare does not cover genetic screening for embryos where there's a family history of cystic fibrosis.
It looks like private insurance does cover screening but...only for patients with fertility problems. I'm not sure I understand this policy:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/content/dam/kporg/final/documents/health-plan-documents/notice/utilization-management/preimplantation-genetic-test-mas-en.pdf
I don't know if this is a good comparison. Cystic fibrosis affects 1/5000 people, type 2 diabetes will affect about 1/3.
Is your figure for type 2 diabetes specifically for the US? A quick google suggests that around 29% of people in the US over age 65 have (diagnosed or undiagnosed) type II diabetes, but around 16% in the EU, with fairly large differences between countries. Admittedly all these numbers are higher than I would have guessed.
One can imagine a dystopian future where McDonalds offers free gene editing to improve their future market share...
One can imagine a dystopian future where McDonalds offers free gene editing specifically towards genes that promote high metabolism and strong nutritional extraction. There are people that eat tons of McDonalds and are somehow magically fit and reasonably healthy anyway. If McDonalds could create tons of these people they could not only have a higher consumer base but actually remove the stigma against them. No need to warn your children not to eat McDonalds every single meal if it actually doesn't harm them, or at least not as strongly or as visibly.
As for another country, there's Britain's NHS which does offer IVF screening of embyos for CF: <https://www.cysticfibrosis.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-10/INF8-3-C-2%20-%20FS%20-%20Cascade_Screening_October2024_RGB%20%281%29.pdf>
>Pre-implantation genetic testing (PGT)
This is a test that is used with IVF, where eggs and sperm are
fertilised to make an embryo in a laboratory. PGT is used to make
sure that only an embryo that does not have CF is put into the
womb. A couple must meet certain criteria to access NHS-funded
PGT, which your genetic counsellor will explain to you.
The other thing that stood out to me about that section is that the logic there does not quite follow. Suppose someone's child would have lived to age 65, but thanks to polygenetic embryo selection was able to live to age 66 instead. This costs the US government more money, not less, because they have to pay one year of medical expenses instead of zero.
I think where this will work, if it works at all, will be in things like "does this embryo have CF or not?" and we can then see if the babies born do or do not develop CF. It'll work where there is a discernible, measurable problem and the result can be discernible and measured: "did the baby develop CF or spina bifida or the rest of it?"
That is a case that can be argued for public health benefits.
The stuff about "taller, smarter, prettier" and the rest? Will always be pie in the sky. Maybe the selected embryo is smarter than if you had gone the natural route, maybe the unselected baby would have been smart anyway. Roll those dice and hope for the jackpot!
It seems to me that using this technology not for vanity but to eliminate such a tragic condition as CF - I recall reading an obituary once, “he was preceded in death by … (his brother, his brother, his brother, his sister)” - would be the necessary justification for selecting for IQ.
Very smart people surely made it possible, but if they can’t get this right … what good were they?
Why do you think of it as an exclusive or? People will used it BOTH ways. Some weighing one factor heavier, and others another.
So maybe we can get less CF and more rappers.
It is important to know that we have made significant advances in treatment for CF over the last few decades. In 2022, the estimated median predicted survival age for a baby born in the UK with CF was 56. In 2023, it was 64. I’d expect to hear the prediction for babies born in 2024 around October. This is extraordinary progress.
It is no longer a disease which guarantees an early death, as it was relatively recently. And the progress is continuing and rapid.
And no gene-editing required for these treatments?
Not yet! They’ve been working on gene-editing therapies for ages: some have looked promising, but I’m not aware of any success yet. It’s been the big thing people have hoped for.
That’s wonderful to hear.
I'm a parent via IVF. When we were weighing the decision to do embryo screening, our providers lightly recommended against it on the following grounds: we are relatively young (mid-30s) and thus comparatively unlikely to have significant age-based aneuploid concerns; and any genetic screening would necessarily involve removal of cells from the embryo which has a non-insignificant chance of disrupting its viability. Can you speak to that latter concern? Particularly for the current userbase of IVF, viability of pregnancy is a pretty paramount topic!
This is a good question that I don't know the answer to. I'm hoping some of the embryo selection people will read this post and share their expertise.
https://guides.orchidhealth.com/post/embryo-biopsy-for-pgta-procedure-risks-and-success-rates:
"As with any medical procedure, embryo biopsy carries some risks. There is a small chance (less than 1-2% with a skilled embryologist) that the embryo may be damaged during the biopsy, causing it to stop developing or making it unsuitable for transfer. While current data suggests that embryo biopsy has no adverse impact on the growth or medical outcomes of the resulting children, it's essential to understand that the technique is still relatively new, and there may be potential unknown consequences for live-born babies. If you're considering PGTA for your frozen embryos, our article on getting Orchid's screening on frozen embryos provides valuable information."
Obviously, they're not an unbiased source.
If embryo biopsy results in a 1-2% chance of serious enough damage that the embryo is damaged enough "to stop developing or mak[e] it unsuitable for transfer," my guess is that that's just the tip of the iceberg, and that more subtle damage is being done to a larger percentage of embryos as well.
My understanding is that a small percentage -- like 5%? -- of embryos are damaged by genetic sampling. There's a newer non-invasive way to test the genetic material in the substrate around the embryo. I bet this will become more common. (I'm no expert, just have done some reading)
One thing that concerns me is the suggestion in the research that IVF conception itself may increase the risk of certain kinds of cancers, particularly with frozen embryo transfer. I think studies say this is a pretty small risk at this point, but if there's a massive increase in people using IVF, it may become a bigger issue.
So would it be fair to effectively "nerf" all of the health benefits quoted above by 5% given that likelihood of the testing being damaging? That certainly affects the final expected value.
I don't think so because a damaged embryo won't be implanted.
Yes, obviously it wouldn't be transferred. But you've lost that embryo. For many current users of IVF, the number of viable embryos that are retrieved is worryingly small, sometimes even just one or two per egg retrieval. If the embryo is damaged, they've gone from "reasonable likelihood of a healthy child" to "no child".
I guess I'm confused because if the data is about reducing risk of conditions for babies that are actually carried to term and born, then 5% of total embryos lost are unlikely to significantly change those improved outcomes.
Average number of eggs per retrieval is 8-14, they are graded by viability. It's true some women produce fewer eggs per retrieval and in that instance may forgo genetic testing because of that, but those are a minority of current IVF patients who are mostly doing IVF because of fertility problems just like that (insufficient egg supply).
Also there is a new method for testing embryos by testing the genetic material that exists in the substrate around the embryo. It's noninvasive to the embryo, and I think we're going to see more of this technique in the coming years because of this concern.
Most current users of IVF are those struggling with fertility issues. If embryo selection becomes normalized, median user with be younger and fertile.
I'm also interested in the possible impact on the balance of men and women in a population. Most of the people I know doing IVF (which is not that many) are making choices about embryos based on sex along side genetic factors. Is anyone talking about this? Do fertility clinics have data about whether these sex-based choices are tipping in one direction or the other?
I see from reading around that IVF skews male though this seems tied to what kind of IVF technology is used rather than because people's choices are skewing outcomes. Maybe too soon to say on that.
I don’t understand this.
I’ve read that people who select for sex prefer girls. Not too hard to believe
That's my anecdotal experience as well.
People who tell you they're selecting for sex will tell you they prefer girls. I'm guessing there's substantial stigma around selecting for boys, to the point where you'd get IQ or something instead as the reason.
Why would there be stigma about selecting for boys?
Roughly speaking? Feminism. More Targetted? China's One Child Policy. More thoughtfully? "I might have to explain this one." (you might have to explain "why girl" as well, but that's "easier to domesticate", rather than "I like the zany, adventurous ones!").
When you might be looking for "the highest IQ baby possible" you're looking for boys, after all. (average IQ higher is girls, of course).
This may be the result of overly cautious providers, but it may be particular to your embryos. If your embryos developed slowly and were frozen at a later-than-optimal stage of development (day 5 is preferred, but many providers will use and freeze days 6 and 7) or if your embryos appeared low grade under the microscope, genetic testing could cause sufficient trauma to the embryo to lose the embryo, especially if a freeze-thaw cycle is involved. This might also be recommended if you have very few embryos.
Removal of the cells for testing has a pretty small chance of harming the embryo under standard/ideal conditions, which is to say removal of cells for PGT-A/-M after fertilization but before initial freezing.
It's best when testing embryos to know upfront (i.e. before freezing) which testing you want to do, and even then testing is not an equal risk for all embryos.
And on average, two-thirds of patients require six or more IVF cycles for a successful pregnancy. At 15-20K a pop that could make a significant cost difference if the Herasight tests reduce the viability of embryos.
So I'm not actually an expert on this, but I did work at a genetic testing company for a year and I've talked with pretty much everyone in the field.
From everything I've read and heard, a trophectoderm biopsy (the standard kind of biopsy taken in IVF) has a negligible impact on live birth rates. I wish I could give you an actual number here like "the impact on llive birth rates is <X% based on this study", but my knowledge is not that deep.
There ARE studies showing that biopsies of the inner cell mass (the part of the embryo that becomes the actual fetus) do have an impact on success rates, but those aren't commonly practiced by clinics.
No doubt I'm an idiot, but why the focus on Type 2 diabetes, which is far more lifestyle-related, rather than on Type 1, which is far more genetically based? Also, I have Type 1 in my family.
Good question. I would guess because Type 2 is about 10x more common, which means more people care about it and they have better genetic data.
T1D is easy to predict but too rare to be of much interest to many customers. Even 5 years ago, PGS AUC was ~90%. https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/5/1703
It's only 90% if you do some goofy thing where you restrict cases to people who developed it at <5 years of age. The AUC for a more realistic case cutoff (<15) is still quite good, but not that good.
Especially since we already have cure for that (GLP-1), if rumours I heard are correct.
Type 2 DM has an extremely strong genetic basis with a MZ twin concordance rate over 80% https://diabetes.org/about-diabetes/genetics-diabetes. This is a common misconception.
Probably because there is a correlation between people who choose their embryos and good life choices/upbringing. So you have a nice data point for your advertisement which will most likely be much lower if you control for this stuff.
I'm curious to know if the risks to the baby have been taken into account here. Not the risks of embryo selection, but the risks of IVF in the first place. Obviously if a couple is having IVF for (eg) fertility reasons, an embryo has to be picked, whatever metric is used. But having IVF purely for embryo selection could be counterproductive, if the process itself leads to an increased risk of some adverse effects (eg preterm birth, lower birth weight), as some studies have suggested. That said, most IVF up to now has been done for couples having fertility issues, so it's hard to disentangle causation. Is this something you have looked into, and taken into account?
I'll add a link to this review, which seems pretty thorough and is open access: https://academic.oup.com/humupd/article/25/2/137/5316072
I hope someone replies to this comment.
I concluded that IVF probably has risks to child health after reading the review linked by Sun Kitten, but I'm not an expert.
Yeah, that review confirms and expands on the risks I was previously aware of. It doesn't sound like a set of risks I'd want to take on if I had a decent chance of natural conception or else could really significantly reduce the absolute risk of serious problems via genetic selection. The cons of current technology still seem like for most people they far outweigh the pros in the OP that are now apparently possible.
Having done IVF, the article dramatically underplays how invasive and utterly miserable the entire process is for women. It involves giving yourself hundreds of hormone shots that swell your ovaries to the size of pomelos, undergoing surgical egg removal (which gave me weeks of internal bleeding), and then giving yourself daily intramuscular shots into your butt for weeks after the embryo is transferred. You can’t exercise or have sex during any of this. It’s common to gain 15-20 pounds. And if course, the hormones themselves make you miserable.
There is NO WAY I - or most women - would ever do IVF if natural conception was an option.
Also, most couples (who are there for infertility, remember) end up with one or two usable embryos, and would never have the luxury of being as picky as this article imagines.
In the not too distant future, the process of IVF could potentially be much less invasive: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241216400051/en/Gameto-Announces-Worlds-First-Live-Birth-Using-Fertilo-Procedure-that-Matures-Eggs-Outside-the-Body, significantly shifting the calculus for parents considering polygenic embryo selection.
Many of these traits represent our society's current values. Even the disease ADHD is mainly a disease because of the current cultural milieu. Is it wise to increase selection pressure as much as these technologies are likely to when they trickle down, given the transitory arbitrariness of the criteria? I can see reducing Alzheimer's and cancer. But I'm uneasy about many of the other criteria.
If having ADHD (to the extent it's a disease) is advantageous in some way, then there will end up being a shortage of people who do whatever jobs people with ADHD are good at, meaning parents will stop selecting against it because they want their kids to be able to get good jobs.
I can easily imagine a tragedy-of-the-commons situation where something is beneficial to society but not to individuals : maybe the jobs ADHD people are good at are low status or otherwise undesirable in a way that can't be corrected by economics in the way you describe. Or ADHD suddenly becomes valuable because of environmental changes. But this doesn't seem terribly likely?
A future with no comedians :(
A future with a lot of things missing in people.
And a decrease in musicians, artists, actors, people who are different and contribute to the rich fabric of society …
Charles Midi’s comment should be much higher in the string of concerns I’ve seen voiced in the comments. Time to rewatch GATACA.
This is by far the least convincing argument against eugenics I've ever heard. Oh no, there'll only be one billion kinds of person instead of one hundred billion, only more worthwhile art being created every week than anyone can can consume in a lifetime instead of every day, what a tragedy.
It would be worth it just for that alone.
I worry about the environmental changes first, because our world is changing at a very rapid rate, but I think the "something is beneficial to society but not to individuals" is underrated. Imagine AIs paid in "content" -- lolcows become a very valuable commodity for a society, then. Regardless of how well they do for themselves.
re: environmental changes I'm hopeful that reduced genetic diversity won't matter a ton because humans have adapted to pretty extremely different environments in the past with changes in memes not genes. Humans *have* adapted genetically to changing environs (high altitude tibetans adapting to low oxygen, duplication of genes to metabolize grains post agricultural revolution... etc.) But these are really quite minor compared to the way humans have adapted to new environs through new technologies (consider the Inuit! Or space travel!)
Even without embryo selection, every population outside Africa is already very homogeneous due to founder effects and rapid population growth and we've done OK. So to be honest I'm not terribly worried that embryo selection will eliminate some essential diversity. Though it is a frightening idea.
You missed our evolutionary adaptations as "fire users" (which seem to be quite extreme).
Manic Depression or other psychological "brainstates" may be what's necessary to make geniuses. (Not that I'm saying every genius was the Romantic Ideal, many are workhorses -- but even they can go through cycles of "up" and "down" -- or inability to start projects because "there's so many ways to start it!")
By "evolutionary adaptations as fire users" are you referring to co-evolution with technology (e.g. we can't extract enough calories to reproduce without some kind of fire/cooking)?
Right now I'm not persuaded by the idea that genius is connected to mental illness, but if it turns out to be so that definitely would suggest embryo selection against mental illness could be pretty bad! That would be its own interesting moral dilemma. "This embryo has X% chance of debilitating mental illness but Y% chance of being a genius and benefiting lots of other people."
I worry that the equilibrium might not shake out to be that adequate. Parents make bad and silly decisions about their children's lives and future all the time, and status game spirals can often take over parts of human culture quite thoroughly.
One problem is the feedback time is too long: if there are actually jobs people with ADHD are good at (but fewer than the amount of people with ADHD today), the issue that we select too much against ADHD will only become apparent 20–30 years after embryo selection becomes widespread, so we'll have an entire generation of people too heavily selected against ADHD.
The vast majority of congenital conditions are universally considered harmful. No one's arguing that anencephaly, Proteus syndrome, Sickle cell disease, asthma, bladder exstrophy, or nearly all the others improve a society. These conditions cause great pain independent of any "cultural milieu."
The argument for preserving certain congenital conditions only applies to the tiny fraction of them that some people think provide some benefit like ADHD or high-functioning autism. These conditions won't be selected against as much since many parents will think they are fine, so I don't see this as being a problem.
Should we be maybe trying to create a database of whole-genome sequences and alleles before we start artificially changing the population distribution? Ideally one that is large enough to capture a pretty large chunk of rare alleles?
I think I'm pretty well on the side of "this is probably a good thing", but in the off chance that wide spread use of this technology causes unforseen problems, knowing what our populations genetic distribution looked like before we messed it all up seems pretty useful.
I think we have databases like this - wouldn't UK Biobank count?
It does, but only for the British population, and only for the healthier, wealthier portion at that (it's the volunteer effect).
We have one. Actually, we have lots. See, for example, gnomAD (https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/), Ensembl (https://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Info/Index), UCSC (https://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTracks?db=hg38) or the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (https://humanpangenome.org/).
(Admittedly, Ensembl and UCSC are genome browsers, but they include variants and their information, such as frequency, predicted impact, and known phenotypes).
Pangenome sounds pretty much like what I'm envisioning, although, if I'm understanding statements on the website correctly, they are talking about the order of hundreds of full genome sequences. That's a great start, but in my opinion, we should probably be aiming for thousands-to-millions to get a fully representative global sample that is large enough to capture non-trivial amounts of rare alleles.
It's going to be a looooong time before this tech has any noticeable impact on genetic diversity. There are about 10 million genetic variants in the human gene pool with a frequency of at least 1%. Even if you did embryo selection for ten generations, and everyone was selected for the same things, you'd barely move that number.
Frankly, even with more powerful techniques like gene editing or iterated meiotic selection you're going to need many generations before this becomes a big concern.
The only area where I'm somewhat worried about this is the human immune system. We've had crazy amounts of selection on the human immune system in the last 10,000 years, to the point where we literally have higher rates of read errors in genetic sequencing when reading regions like the HLA. It's also harder to judge the tradeoffs you're making when changing immune variants because often they're present to protect against plagues or other uncommon diseases. We can't really phenotype those effects well until there's some sort of pandemic.
HLA pops up in GWASes for every damn trait too, so alleles there might be weighted highly in the predictors these companies are using? (Or maybe they are filtered out, since as you noted it's hard to align to that region?) One can imagine a "tragedy of the commons" situation, where every individual is incentivized to select for a certain set of immune haplotypes that e.g. reduce schizophrenia risk, but this counteracts diversifying selection at that locus, making the population as a whole more vulnerable to disease. But that's just a worst-case I have no strong reason to believe currently.
> We can't really phenotype those effects well until there's some sort of pandemic.
That's a good point. It reminds me of an old saw that goes something like:
Student: The mouse knockout model has no phenotype.
Professor: Well, did you take it to the opera?"
(The joke being that you can't know that the gene doesn't produce a phenotype under opera conditions until you explicitly test it.)
Well the plague protection benefits of some HLA variant would increase as the population as a whole became more vulnerable, so if you have good enough predictors and there is at least some transparency into what other parents are selecting for, this is something that in theory we should be able to avoid.
Though it would obviously be more difficult than the usual kind of selection.
Honestly the hardest part is probably going to be figuring out which HLA or other immune variants protect against which pandemics. This is why I think by default we should be prioritizing immune diversity **relative to other people in the population**
>Well the plague protection benefits of some HLA variant would increase as the population as a whole became more vulnerable
Maybe. It also seems very possible that, rather than the main effect of HLA heterogeneity being "at least someone will have a protective allele when a pandemic hits", HLA heterogeneity is *itself* protective. If most people have the same HLA the pathogen just needs to change its protein sequences to avoid antigen presentation by that one HLA. If we all have different HLAs the pathogen needs to avoid being presented by ANY of them, which dramatically constrains it & reduces transmissibility in a population, preventing outbreaks. So your neighbor's HLA diversity could benefit you.
(This is not to mention the specter of other nasty things like transmissible cancers that can result from low genetic diversity in immune genes).
>if you have good enough predictors and there is at least some transparency into what other parents are selecting for, this is something that in theory we should be able to avoid.
Absolutely. I would bet that by the time that embryo selection became wide-spread enough to start seriously affecting allele frequencies the tech will have improved enough that we can just give kids whatever MHC to promote diversity relative to the population just as you suggest & this whole thing will be a moot point.
Who says we aren't artificially changing the population distribution? We have had significant manmade interventions on the population scale side, and they may have reproductive effects.
It seems kind of rude to say Kenyan pastoralists get weather predictions from a Shaman instead of being able to connect to the same exact up-to-the-minute weather satellite data as everyone else
I've edited, but don't those only predict for the next ten days, rather than whether it will be a good or bad season?
There are definitely 90-day weather forecasts from normal forecasting services.
I suspect these are fake, but I guess I also suspect shamans are fake, so whatever.
Meteorologists I know tell me the predictions for next week are mostly priors, i.e., what was the average weather in previous years?
I'll bet I can predict with great accuracy whether 90 days from now it will be hotter or colder than today in a given city in the world. Not perfectly (gets fuzzier in the tropics) but generally, November has different temperatures than August in most places and the direction of weather is practically always in one direcction.
ENSO is ENSO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation
It's fairly predictive into the future, when it's strong, and "interesting" when it's in the middle of the cycle.
I imagine this isn't the only "widescale weather pattern" that can be used for seasonal predictions, but it's the first that popped into my head.
My understanding is that:
* Kenya, unlike developed countries, does not have weather radar, and therefore does not really have up-to-the-minute weather forecasts.
* Satellite data is definitely useful for weather forecasts, especially storm forecasts, but on a timescale of hours to days, not minutes.
Paging Keanu Reeves' agent!
Keanu has to star in the biopic "Jonny Anomaly."
Haha, very good!
(But I'd still have preferred Gene Hackman)
It's exciting to see how this field is progressing! My wife and I will likely be customers of one of these companies in the near future.
Regarding SMN and spinal muscular atrophy, the SMN gene is rather difficult to analyze because there are regions of the genome (SMN pseudogenes) that look very similar. Still, difficult is not impossible and I'd expect Nucleus to do better, given that the focus of their company is genetic testing. (See: https://www.illumina.com/science/genomics-research/articles/HBA-SMN-genotyping.html)
And regarding cost, hopefully this will come down in the near future. The cost for genotyping/sequencing should be, at most, in the low hundreds of dollars per embryo, and I think now that this kind of selection is starting to be within the Overton window, we'll see competition drive down the price. So most of the costs will end up being IVF.
Furthermore I think companies which do the actual genotyping/sequencing (GP and Orchid, right now) will end up with a competitive advantage in the long term.
Here's another concern I have about IVF becoming more widespread in order to access genetic testing... and it's about the physical and psychological impact on women. It's an unbelievably demanding process above and beyond pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood which are already incredibly demanding. Anyone who has done it can speak to what a very hard road it is for most women.
Last I checked, something like 70% of women going through IVF experience clinical levels of anxiety and depression. About half of women under 35 get pregnant in the first cycle, so even younger women are likely to need to go through more than one cycle and women over 35 even more.
Though I should add that most (not all) IVF right now happens to address infertility issues and that's no doubt part of the psychological anguish of the process. But the hormones, pain, unpredictability, cost, risk, etc etc even without infertility are still quite a load.
True, but women can make their own decisions. And if you consider the impact of having a child with schizophrenia, it may be a good investment.
One thing you're not taking into account here is just how much worse IVF outcomes are for women with known fertility issues.
If you're having trouble conceiving, IVF can help but your odds still won't necessarily be that great. This is especially true for women in their late 30s or early 40s. If you're under 35 and you have no fertility issues, your odds of having a kid via even just a single round of IVf are around >85%
What really makes people go crazy with IVF is multiple rounds of egg retrieval, implantation, and failure. Yes there are unpleasant side-effects of the medications you need to take, but the things that really drives people crazy is not being able to have the child they so desperately want.
My husband and I are currently doing IVF to polygenically screen our children with Herasight (my retrieval is next Tuesday). And I think I would say that while infertility is hell, IVF is not that bad
My experience with IVF has been exciting and kinda fun. I’m lucky that I haven’t really had bad side effects so far (in fact I feel great - the progesterone they have me on has improved my sleep 1000%, and I am going to ask if I could potentially continue with it after IVF). It also helps that I don’t really mind needles, and also that our numbers look great (my AMH and AFC are nice and high). The most annoying part is the cost (probably about 8k all up for this round). We are paying out of pocket, and going to a super low cost clinic (CNY)
I think the fact that we are expecting a great result (lots of embryos, and eventually happy healthy babies) makes the cost/discomfort feel more like a worthwhile sacrifice. Going through all this and not getting a single healthy embryo would suck enormously.
I don’t want to downplay how hard IVF is for most women - but I do think that most of the depression and anxiety associated with the experience comes from the fact that infertility is really, really awful, and the constant vacillating between sadness and hope would do anyone’s head in. The actual IVF process is (not always) that bad
I'm glad your IVF is going well, and hope you have wonderful healthy children!
If anyone else reading this *does* really mind needles, they should be aware that the topical anesthetic EMLA cream can significantly reduce the pain of needles. Common practice is often to apply it just half an hour, or so, before injections, but the literature shows it's actually most effective when left on for several hours before an injection.
EMLA is available over the counter in some countries (like Canada), and requires a prescription in others (like the US).
Topical anesthetics should arguably be incorporated as standard options for procedures involving needles, but since they aren't, patients who might want them need to pursue them, themselves.
Can I ask your age and the attrition rate from eggs to blasts you experienced at CNY? I'm in the process of choosing a clinic to do IVF in order to polygenically screen, and I've been a bit wary of CNY's lower success rates (unsure how much of that is due to selection effects).
I've also considered doing an egg share program where the retrieval and meds are free in exchange for giving away half the retrieved eggs, but I'm not blessed with a high AMH/ACF, so it would take me a ridiculous number of retrievals to end up with enough embryos for polygenic screening to make sense.
I'm 32
Just got my day 5/6 report today!
Results from my retrieval on the 5th:
39 eggs retrieved
24 mature (61.5% - not great 😭)
17 fertilised (70.1% - pretty good)
I was feeling pretty sad about the maturity rate. It seems like my cohort ended up pretty asynchronous, which is something I want to work on for next time. I think fertilisation to blast rate is usually about 50%, so I was expecting like 8 blasts. But I got the call today that I have 13 blasts! (4 day 5, and 9 day 6), and potentially one day 7 blast.
So overall pretty pleased with CNY. I think my med regime needs to be tweaked, but the CNY embryology lab accomplished great things in terms of fertilisation/incubation.
The official CNY success numbers are not great, but I think this is impacted by the fact that they will literally take anyone, and often take people who other clinics have turned away (super high bmi, advanced maternal age, other issues).
I actually think they are perfect for people doing polygenic embryo screening. If you are not infertile, and are doing IVF purely for screening reasons, you can get great results from CNY for like 1/3 of the cost of the average IVF clinic
I think I spent about 7k at CNY (that includes retrieval, meds, monitoring, bloods etc). And I will spend $5,700 to PGTA test the 13 embryos ($200 per embryo sampling fee from CNY, and then $3,100 to cooper genomics (the PGTA testing company). So about 13k all up. I think it would be a struggle to get a cheaper rate, even if you went to south america or Cyprus.
Those are great numbers, congrats!
Thanks!
Two contradictory points:
- I think that all future costs should be time discounted (the why is a whole debate over ethics and economics, but I come down strongly pro). By that argument this somehow comes out as not worth it (per your calculations), despite how great it sounds.
- I'm calling baloney on a 6iq point gain being worth that little. If we were incorporating the uncertainty about it (10% chance it works as promised otherwise you get nothing), then maybe, but an actual 6 point IQ gain can't possibly be worth only a five or six figure sum of money.
Scott cites Zagorsky (2007) for the estimate and there are a few of reasons to think the true value would be higher.
First, Zagorsky (2007) is based on a 2004 survey, but in skimming the study, it doesn't look like they adjusted for inflation between 2004 and 2007, which was about 10%. Scott seems to have adjusted for inflation since 2007, but if I'm right, the adjustment should have been about 10% higher.
Second, simply adjusting for CPI from 2007 (or even 2004) probably underestimates the modern equivalent estimate. That's because over time, people have become richer in real terms. Higher IQ presumably shifts you along the income distribution, but since the country is richer than it was in 2004 (with real GDP per capita increasing by about a third) an equivalent SD shift would have a greater impact.
Third, income stratification by IQ has increased over time, suggesting that current returns to IQ would be higher than in 2004, see here: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1818758295856771135.
Fourth, and probably most importantly, reanalyses of the Zagorsky data show higher correlations than Zagorsky found. For example, Dalliard (2016): https://humanvarieties.org/2016/01/31/iq-and-permanent-income-sizing-up-the-iq-paradox/ found that when considering multiple years of data, the return of 1 IQ point to permanent income is $1,130 (95% CI: 1048-1213) in 2011 dollars, or $950 in 2004 dollars, more than double the Zagorsky estimate.
Using log-transformed income data to address non-linearity, he finds that the affect of 1 IQ point is an increase in income of 2.5%, such that the affect of 6 IQ points would be an increase of income of 16%.
Scott's estimate implies that 6 IQ points would boost annual income by $4,020. Per Dalliard, that would only be true if one's salary without the IQ boost would be $25,125. In other words, per Dalliard, it wildly underestimates it.
For the median salary in the US of $62,088, the annual income boost would be $9,915. For readers interested who presumably have higher than median expected earnings, the boost would be larger, yet.
And my third point applies to Dalliard as well as Zagorsky, suggesting that modern data might show an even higher estimate for Dalliard's analysis. Indeed, the Tweet above shows precisely that - for the same data being referenced above (but different years), the effect of IQ on income (for given ages) was significantly larger for the cohort born in 1997 than the cohort born in 1979.
After writing this, I see that the analysis in the Tweet came from here: https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/how-profitable-is-embryo-selection which actually addresses this very topic, estimating the effect of a 1 IQ point increase on total lifetime earnings of between $40,000 and $90,000, ignoring discounting, just as Scott did in footnote 8.
We've all met (or are) plenty of smart people who don't earn a good return on their intellect
Sure, but on the other hand we've also met people who just barely missed out on jobs that could double or triple their pay.
(There's also significant non-direct financial issues, like reduced probability of violent crime or increased marriage stability).
Damn. I was rushing to write something about this since yesterday but Scott beat me to it.
All I’ll say is that I have a feeling this will be one of those incredibly transformative technologies that change the course of human history forever. I’m somewhat of an ASI skeptic, so I imagine a relatively near future where 3 generations of this technology rapidly improving leads to a real sense of “super babies.” There’s enough sci-fi written about this idea that it’s not important for me to go into all the interesting utopias and dystopias this might lead to.
I think ASI will render this stuff moot in a few years, but if humanity had any will to not die, this is how. We'd halt the AI race, make ourselves smarter through genetic engineering, and then try our hands at solving alignment with our newfound wisdom.
My only regret is that it seems I might be a little too late to get involved with it. Maybe not though.
If we can't align AI with other AI, why should we be able to align AI with designer babies?
Because humans are aligned with us to begin with.
That's like saying that English colonizers were necessarily aligned with Sudanese tribes.
There's no reason a priori to expect designer babies to have values unaligned with humanity.
I see your point that you're building on the same architecture, and raising them to have positive feelings towards other humans. But depending on how far they are ahead of baseline humanity, they may not be interested in allowing baseline humanity to participate in collective decisions - they would see it as like allowing children to vote and bind adults to their decisions. I agree that there's a difference between that and an ASI, but I'm not convinced there isn't any overlap between the problems.
Herasight? As in Hera, casting Hephaestus from the mountain for being deformed?
She's the goddess of childbirth.
Hera is goddess of marriage. Ilithyia is the goddess of childbirth, and Hera used her to delay the birth of Heracles so his kinsman Eurystheus could be born first and become king:
"On the night Heracles and Iphicles were to be born, Hera, knowing of her husband Zeus's adultery, persuaded Zeus to swear an oath that the child born that night to a member of the House of Perseus would become High King. Hera did this knowing that while Heracles was to be born a descendant of Perseus, so too was Eurystheus. Once the oath was sworn, Hera hurried to Alcmene's dwelling and slowed the birth of Heracles and Iphicles by forcing Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, to sit cross-legged with her clothing tied in knots, thereby causing the twins to be trapped in the womb. Meanwhile, Hera caused Eurystheus to be born prematurely, making him High King in place of Heracles. She would have permanently delayed Heracles's birth had she not been fooled by Galanthis, Alcmene's servant, who lied to Ilithyia, saying that Alcmene had already delivered the baby. Upon hearing this, she jumped in surprise, loosing the knots and inadvertently allowing Alcmene to give birth to Heracles and Iphicles."
So, um, yeah: great patron for picking and choosing who is going to be born for which traits, not so much for "child will have happy life afterwards".
Eesh, none of that is what I'd want to be invoking, but I think Immortal Lurker is right there's an intentional link.
Oh definitely, just not (it would appear, if even Scott is confused as to what Hera is the patron deity of) the associations customers think they are invoking.
"Hi! Our patron is in fact the goddess of marriage, not childbirth, and very vengeful about adultery or non-marital relationships, and very much up for revenge on the offspring of same! So let's all be certain that you're married, not to other people, and having babies under traditional norms or else there might be serpents in the cradle - so to speak" 😁
Worked out pretty well for Hephaestus. He got his own forge in a giant volcano, and married to the goddess of love/lust (even if she cucks him most of the time).
They're just poly
I need the san fran postrat explanation of why their marriage was great.
I really, really wish that Scott and other effective altruists took the personhood objection seriously.
I'm not talking about the primary concern that Scott mentions in the linked post, "Who Does Polygenic Selection Help?"; I'm talking about the secondary, "pro-life" concern--the concern that, beginning at fertilization, a human embryo has moral value that's similar in magnitude to a newborn baby, and so abandoning or destroying it is morally akin to abandoning or killing a newborn baby.
Although the philosophical positions that underlie that concern aren't ironclad, I think it's the most plausible account of when humans acquire moral value. At the very least, it's a *plausible* account. Consequently, that should make EAs very reluctant to advocate for a practice that might grow to result in the industrialized killing of millions (perhaps billions) of people per year.
The closest that Scott comes to addressing this is saying that if we threw out polygenic selection on these grounds, then we would have to throw out IVF too. So be it. I don't think that the moral correctness of IVF is a reasonable anchor for our intuition whatsoever.
Even Scott's claim that polygenic screening doesn't exacerbate the issue is seriously wrong. In classic IVF, the purpose of creating multiple embryos is to increase the probability of pregnancy. This number has a conservative upper bound to minimize the possibility of triplets, quadruplets, etc. In contrast, the ideal number of embryos for polygenic screening is practically unlimited, because almost none of them are intended to be implanted. Knowledgeable proponents like Gene Smith and Jonathan Anomaly advocate for batches of dozens, if not hundreds, of embryos per pregnancy. This would easily increase the impact of the ethical question by a factor of 10. Furthermore, if polygenic screening becomes the norm (as some advocate), then the impact will increase by an *extra* factor of at least 20, based on current IVF rates.
I understand the appeal of polygenic screening. I really do--and if it wasn't for the issue of embryonic rights, I would be an avid proponent. As it stands, though, we risk creating an entrenched moral catastrophe akin to the next factoring farming, and the people who pride themselves about their quantitatively informed moral sensibilities don't seem willing to properly wrestle with it.
An embryo at the stages we're talking about here is a double-digit number of cells. It doesn't even have a nervous system, and seems less conscious than an insect, let alone a newborn. If you're coming at this from the abortion debate, where we're talking about fetuses with beating hearts and semi-working brains, your intuitions will be totally off. I think if you want to argue for embryo rights, you need some non-materialist conception of what personhood is or why it matters, which is going to be a hard sell.
I don't think that embryonic rights require a non-materialist account of personhood--at least not in a way that's suspicious.
Suppose that while you're walking in the woods, you encounter a hermit who's fast asleep. If you had a way of killing him instantly, would it be morally acceptable to do so? He's not currently experiencing any desires, he wouldn't feel any pain while being killed, and nobody would miss him.
If you consider that to be murder, then what's the morally relevant difference between the hermit and an embryo? Surely it's not the nervous system itself that's morally significant; it's the capacity for consciousness that we associate with the nervous system. A human embryo also has this capacity; it's merely a step farther removed from manifesting this capacity. The embryo has to grow a nervous system, but why is that different from the hermit having to wake up?
How is this different from saying that a couple that has three kids but chooses not to have a fourth is murdering their fourth kid, and exactly as culpable as a couple that has four kids and then kills one?
I think I would solve the hermit situation by saying that the hermit has a preference against dying (ie formed this preference when he was awake), and that preference can't be ignored just because he's asleep right now.
Thanks Scott for directing me down here.
I think a good criteria for moral standing is existence and the potential for consciousness. An embryo has both, a sleeping hermit has both, an unconcieved child does not.
I don't think your hermit explanation holds up - why is an assumed past preference to live any more valuable than the assumed future preference to live that an embryo has?
I agree that the preference explanation doesn't suffice: even if we suppose that the hermit was temporarily depressed, with no desire to survive, it's still bad if they die when they would have otherwise recovered and lived a happy future life.
The better explanation is that the hermit is psychologically continuous with their (possible) future self. An embryo isn't. (See my reply to Matthew's comment for more detail.)
Could you give a more detailed account of why you think an embryo has "potential for consciousness" but (you seem to imply) an unfertilized egg does not?
The unfertilized egg requires an outside intervention to eventually become conscious, but this seems true of an embryo in a test tube as well; neither is going to develop into a healthy baby without a great deal of outside help.
to better phrase what i said above, existence as something with the potential for consciousness gives moral standing. An unfertilized egg does not meet that - it has to completely change through fertilization to have that potential. An embryo in a test tube only needs the right conditions to develop consciousness. other choices can be argued, but i think fertilization is the most reasonable as far as yielding a radical step change from no standing to standing.
An embryo has a full complement of human DNA, it is meaningfully "this person" rather than "that person".
It sounds like on your theory, sperm should have moral standing, which is pretty bad news.
Or suppose that one day robots become conscious. There is a lump of metal in the robot factory. Does it have moral standing, since it could one day be turned into a robot?
I just don't think we need to worry about things that don't have moral standing yet, just because they theoretically could in some future which is not going to happen.
I do think you need to have something like an assumption that past preferences extend into the future to value anyone's preferences at all. Suppose I don't want someone to scream in my ear. I'm probably not thinking about that at this exact moment. You need to sort of abstract my into a continuously-existing being in order to respect that preference and not scream in my ear.
(another reason not to grant embryos moral standing is that I think more than half of embryos that implant are spontaneously aborted because the body decides it doesn't like them for some reason. If we thought embryos had moral standing, this would become the worst genocide in history, and the most important cause would be inventing some kind of artificial womb to save them. But in fact I predict most people don't care about this very much.)
We used to have 50% child mortality. Most people couldn’t do anything about it and just accepted it. Not a genocide, because it’s not the intentional killing of a particular ethnic group, but definitely a mass tragedy.
For infertile couples, if we could end that spontaneous abortion, they’d be happy to have their children. For other couple as well, this kind of miscarriage is probably as sad as losing a newborn would’ve been in cultures that prevented naming until 6+ weeks to avoid being attached.
The argument from consequences isn’t a good one because humans have accepted plenty of bad consequences before we had the capability to end them.
I don’t think an individual sperm is alive in the way an embryo is. An embryo needs food, water, and shelter to grow. From the moment of conception its life plan is determined. A sperm needs an egg, and different eggs will result in different life plans (genes). Much much less deterministic. I think you can say that “you” were once an embryo. I don’t think you can say you were once that sperm, because that sperm could really have become anybody else
My line is existence as something with potential for consciousness. I don't think a sperm qualifies as a person, so doesn't qualify.
I'm going to call robot moral standing out of scope (we're having a hard enough time with people).
Your idea about a moral obligation to stop the genocide of embryos through science is very interesting though. I hadn't thought of this from an EA perspective. I think this still works though - GiveWell says right now it costs 3k to save a life in Nigeria. To argue for devoting your altruism to saving embryos, you'd have to be convinced you could find something that costs less than 3k per embryo (accounting for any suffering from the procedure) plus the up front research cost. I don't think that's likely, but if you could I think I'd be for it.
EDIT: see my response to Matthew Milone's response to me. I am not calling you a blatant murderer in this comment.
I agree with others that there is a significant difference between an embryo and a sperm. An embryo is an organism that has the complete genetic information it needs for a human body and (unless someone puts a stop to it or deprives it of a healthy environment) is already at work building it's human body. It isn't a building block in the same way that a sperm or a hot meal is. It is a living organism that is consuming energy in order to build up and develop into what it already completely *is*, not in order to become something other. Nothing further is added to it for the rest of its life other than sustenance.
A sperm isn't like that. A sperm is happy to go it's whole life swimming around and then to die. No matter how much sustenance you give it, it won't develop any further. You need to combine it with a whole different organism for it to become something other than it was, and from there it's a human, no longer a sperm or an egg. I agree that you can't grant moral standing to a lump of clay or to sperm, but that doesn't have anything to do with an embryo, which is a human at the very beginning of its development, not a building block of a human.
As for the issue of spontaneous abortions: I admit that it's pretty hard for me to feel emotions instinctively about a human that still only consists of a few cells (at least ones that I can't see--something weird triggers inside me when I see imaging of an embryo), but thinking about the fact you bring up I do think it's tragic. I think there is not much that the average person could do to solve the problem other than not to try to have kids, but I don't think they would be guilty of a death from the woman's body rejecting the embryo, just as they wouldn't be guilty if their child later died of cancer. Both are bodies not operating as they should.
Just because the average person is unable to do anything about a common cause of embryo (human) death, I don't think that justifies them in intentionally killing a different embryo.
That's a simple explanation, but I really do believe it's as simple as that. For someone like you, who has studied and thought about these kinds of things extremely extensively, I would imagine it would be incredibly difficult for you to think of it in simple terms like this. I wouldn't blame you. And if one day you change your mind and feel guilty of the murder of your own children (although if the embryos are frozen then technically they're not murdered, but that's still a really weird moral ground. I was very surprised just now when I googled it, though, to find out that there are embryos from 30+ years ago being unfrozen and allowed to develop into babies) I don't think any reasonable person would condemn you for it aside from your own self. If you don't belive in God, then what's the point anyway. And if you one day come to believe and have faith in Jesus, he will have compassion and forgiveness for you.
To produce a conscious robot, a lump of metal must be augmented with far, far more information/structure/complexity than it already has. In contrast, a human embryo requires very little additional complexity to produce a conscious human, relative to its current complexity.
I think that's the important sense in which a human embryo has the capacity to become conscious, but a piece of metal does not. Similarly, a sperm cell requires something that is just as complex as itself (the egg) to gain consciousness. I think this also contributes demarcating identity. In other words, it's part of why we can say "you were an embryo" but not "you were a sperm".
Regarding continuity of preferences: I think that most of the intuitive force in your example actually comes from the fact that screaming in someone's ear is inherently unpleasant. If you didn't know that someone screaming next to your ear would be unpleasant, it would still be nearly or exactly as immoral for me to do so.
Joan nicely addresses your point about the miscarriage rate. I have some more thoughts about it, but they're tangential.
Please bear in mind that most of these potential consciousnesses die. Also bear in mind that something like 50% of Americans signed up for interventions which would directly lead to "the potential for consciousness" being terminated. (ahem, okay, only half of them were female, and some of not childbearing age -- you still didn't see people (who weren't Jewish and in Israel) running around issuing fatwahs about the intervention).
True, but lots of unfortunate things happen, I don't think this can be used to justify purposely causing them to happen. I'm not sure what you're referencing with 50% of Americans, but i've seen the choices approximately 50% of Americans have made, and it doesn't really inspire confidence in them being a barometer for morality.
>How is this different from saying that a couple that has three kids but chooses not to have a fourth is murdering their fourth kid, and exactly as culpable as a couple that has four kids and then kills one?
The standard answer would be that fertilised eggs, unlike hypothetical people, have at least some form of moral personhood, by virtue of having a complete complement of DNA.
If you trace a person back through time you'll find they change a lot as they regress into a child, then a baby, then a fetus, but there's one discontinuous point beyond which you can't say that "this person" still exists, and that's the point where that egg combined with _this particular_ sperm rather than any other.
That's the standard (non-religious) version of the Life Begins At Conception argument, anyway.
Thanks for your replies. I wish that I responded more quickly, but I've been moving to a new apartment this weekend. I have no hard feelings if you've moved on to other conversations.
In the first case, the fourth child doesn't exist, and something that doesn't exist can't be murdered. Ultimately, it comes down to personal identity being traceable to roughly as far back as fertilization. I'll elaborate on that below your reply to Geran.
Regarding the hermit problem: see Richard Y. Chappell's response:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suddenly-trait-based-embryo-selection/comment/140987418
No the fourth child DOES exist. The particles that would make him/her up do exist in the universe thus the unmanifest body in this state belongs to them.
Why not start with personal identity starting here if you aren't willing to join personal identity with when conscious experience begins?
A sleeping hermit has a mind, even if their mental states aren't being actively processed. It's completely different from merely having a "potential" to form mental states after a bunch of further development.
I think there's an absolutely decisive argument that embryos aren't harmed by death. It's that only beings with minds can be harmed at all.
Many philosophers (from Locke through to Parfit) have been convinced that some kind of psychological continuity is what matters in survival. Here's why: If a mad scientist scanned my brain, disintegrated my body, and then wiped your brain and implanted all of my mental traits (memories, beliefs, values, personality, etc.) in its place, then it seems that I have gotten the better half of the deal. I have survived and you have not. Though your body is the one that lives on, it is our minds that matter, and it seems that your mind has been replaced by mine. In making this judgment, we implicitly judge that it is the content of a mind that matters -- the memories, beliefs, desires, and so forth -- not its "location" in a particular body, or even a particular brain.
Suppose this scenario goes ahead. I wake in your body and return to my old life (as best I can). Does this make any difference to you? Suppose you're told beforehand that after your mind is wiped and replaced with mine, I'll go on to live a happy life. Or maybe you're told that I'll be killed the next day. You might for altruistic reasons prefer the former news, but do you think that you are harmed if the latter outcome occurs instead? If not, this goes to show that preventing future pleasures from being experienced in your body is no harm to you, if you are not the one who will get to experience them.
It follows that mindless embryos cannot "survive" (in the moral sense, i.e. mentally), and hence aren't harmed or deprived of anything by their biological deaths.
I follow what you're saying about the mind being more important than the body, but I dont see how this refutes the idea that denying a pre-conscious, extant being the opportunity to become concious is morally wrong.
Call the embryo 'Emby'. If you agree that you aren't benefited by having me live on in your body, then you should also agree that Emby isn't benefited by having some future person live in their body. Emby can't "become" conscious, any more than you can give my next lecture after I take over your body. Bodies are just husks. It's minds that matter, and Emby isn't one and never will be one.
It seems the crux of our disagreement is the idea that "It's that only beings with minds can be harmed at all"
I think it's pretty common in EA to consider the welfare of future humans who don't even exist yet, much less have minds, in moral calculations. Scott even does in this article ( along the lines of think of the future person who won't have lung cancer because someone selected against it in ivf)
How do you handle this? Do you think future generations have moral standing? If so, how do you square this with them not having minds?
Merely possible people (who never end up existing with minds, e.g. because we go extinct first) can't be harmed. But harms aren't all that matter. It would be better to bring about a future with more happy, valuable lives, and I think we have moral reasons to bring about better rather than worse futures for the world, all else equal. I explain my view of existential harms and benefits in more detail here:
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/the-profoundest-error-in-population
Future people do, of course, have minds. They just aren't present at this moment.
I read your post. I found myself nodding along but wondering why it's reasonable to prefer Joy's existence and not Emby's, especially since Emby is already further down the path to consciousness than Joy.
I believe that you can harm a future person who will exist by making their life worse than it would otherwise have been, but you can't harm a never-existent person by making them not exist at all.
So if I use drugs while I'm pregnant, and this causes me to give birth to a baby with some sort of disability, I am culpable. But if I decide not to have a child, I'm not culpable. And this is true even though if we start with an existing person, killing them is worse than disabling them!
So it's fine to care about future generations in the sense of having good policies that protect the environment for future generations or something, because you are making the lives of people who will exist better off.
So you care about the lives of future generations of people who are theoretical and do not exist yet, but don't care about the existing lives of future people, embryos.
Go back in time to when your kids were embryos. If someone had the power to and decided to destroy them when they were still just a couple dozen cells, and replaced them with different embryos (sorry I don't know what kind of twins you have so modify as needed) would that seem wrong to you?
Now what if someone had the power to, and decided to change which sperm and egg met to create your child/children. There were never embryos of your existing kids, just different ones, but the result is the same as the above example. You wouldn't have the same kids you have, but would it still feel morally wrong?
When I consider this, I think the first scenario is something akin to murder, but the second is not.
This makes sense. So it still comes back to when is someone a person. I still think fertilization makes more since than other options. It sounds like you might say consciousness, I'm curious what benchmark you use for that and when that approximately occurs.
This is good insight into EA. And quite predictable from the very observation of their concern with remote future --which does not exist.
They display quite an inversion from the normal expanding zones of moral concern. One goes out from concern with people near one and time close by, to progressively less concern about places and times distant from us.
Anything whatsoever might be justified by the inversion of this normal process.
Arguments are futile in moral matters. Since arguments can proceed to conclusion only if premises are shared. But between materialists and non-materialists key premises are not shared.
Not sure about "futile". It may be futile discussing the "morals of IVF" outside a real world. But IVF is as much real world as are IUDs, miscarriages and all people alive on this planet. 1. Sure, one can argue that condoms are ok, the pill ambiguous but IUDs 'clearly' morally abhorrent, as they keep a fertilized egg from implanting (why my teacher for Catholic religion was vs. IUDS). In real life, people call them all contraceptives and near all use them according to their preferences (STI a potential problem? Not feeling well with the hormones? Long time planning?), not to "moral" considerations. Looking at miscarriages, one may call 'our Lord: the greatest aborterOAT' - but then it may be for the better not to have all embryos become toddlers.
IVF: if one asked Emby: "Hey, you are in an IVF-clinic, together with 3 siblings: we will check you now and implant the "best one". The other go in the bin. Are you willing to take your 25% chance or shall you prefer the bin right away?" - a smart emby would say: I take my chances.
And sorry to our extreme pro-lifers, humans will not implant AND deliver all their IVF-embies. Nor will they refrain from IUDs nor will they have only 2.3 times sex in their life. Except the protestant couple after "every sperm is sacred". ;) It is selection all the way down.
Fwiw, it's not like iuds are the only option. Condoms, surgery, and the pill (depending on who you believe) solve the problem of wanting to have sex but not wanting to destroy embryos.
Just to check, do you disagree with the following premise?
> "If a mad scientist scanned my brain, disintegrated my body, and then wiped your brain and implanted all of my mental traits (memories, beliefs, values, personality, etc.) in its place, then it seems that I have gotten the better half of the deal. I have survived and you have not."
(fwiw I'm not a materialist, but I still accept a psychological theory of personal identity)
More materially (ha), I fail to appreciate the special perspectives within the embryo vs person debate in the first place. Surely these moral objections either way are themselves the product of Fisherian runaway selection - the heightened awareness of a particular trait with selective advantage. What genetics has originated, genetical intervention may cure.
This is an interesting objection.
In the scenario that you describe, you might get the better half of the deal, but only because the combined entity will act as an agent who will pursue your values posthumously. I don't think that the entity *is* you; I think you died. I don't know whether I'd consider the entity to be me or a third person.
Beyond my mere intuition against "you" being the correct answer, that answer is also challenged by a related scenario: suppose the scientist scanned your brain and implanted your mind in my body but *didn't* disintegrate your original body. Which one is you?
It certainly isn't the one with my body--there's no way that the combination of your original body and you original mind has the weaker claim. The destruction of your original body seems incidental, so I'm skeptical that my body becomes the "real" you upon your original body's destruction.
I don't think the correct answer is that *both* bodies are you, either. There's clearly a sense in which they're distinct from one-another, and the identity relation is transitory.
The classic Parfitian view (which I agree with) is that it's a mistake to think there's any deep significance to talk of a "real" you. What matters in survival is just psychological continuity, and in the case you describe I bear the relevant relation to TWO future continuants: double survival, in effect!
For background on Parfit's view, see: https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/do-you-really-exist-over-time
This isn't the first time that I've heard of Parfit's work, and although I plan to read him in-depth eventually, I don't have time in the near-term to read more than the linked post.
I think it will suffice to say that we have different accounts of personal identity. Mine is anchored to the structure that produces consciousness (i.e. the organism), whereas yours is anchored to the pattern of conscious experiences.
>it seems that your mind has been replaced by mine.
All it takes to disintegrate this line of reasoning and your philosophical methodology is to say "No it doesn't" and ask "What is your empirical evidence it seems this way to any population sample?"
If you don't find a core premise of the argument compelling, then it won't convince you personally. That's fine - that's just how arguments work. Observing this fact doesn't do anything to "disintegrate" the argument: it remains perfectly compelling to those who do accept the intuitive premise (which in my experience is most people I discuss it with; but no part of the argument depends on broader agreement; it works for those who accept the premises no matter how many others don't).
>If you don't find a core premise of the argument compelling, then it won't convince you personally. That's fine - that's just how arguments work.
That wasn't my point. Of course if all I had to contribute was "Anybody can say nuh uh," I wouldn't contribute it, because then you could just say "Nuh uh" to the part of my previous comment where I said my objection disintegrates your methodology and then proceed to ignore any issue I tried to raise. The point was that "it seems that your mind has been replaced by mine" is a contentious topic that has to be investigated properly - which would entail not just saying "it seems" in place of evidence to justify the claim.
>Observing this fact doesn't do anything to "disintegrate" the argument: it remains perfectly compelling to those who do accept the intuitive premise
It "remains perfectly compelling" insofar as it's taking a position on a contentious topic. But it's not evidence or informative, because you would either be double counting your evidence or begging the question. "It seems that your mind has been replaced by mine" is just expressing a position on psychological continuity in the context of your thought experiment. Once the dialectic is disambiguated in this way, the putative evidentiary force of the argument disintegrates because it's just stating a position on psychological continuity that's rejected by everybody who doesn't already subscribe to it. It was just previously obscured by adding "it seems" before making a truth claim about the position, which misleadingly makes it seem like you've provided more evidence than you have for the position.
>which in my experience is most people I discuss it with
How do you propose to resolve a contestation where I claim "it seems that your mind has [not] been replaced by mine" and I cite my personal relationships as evidence? Presumably that negation of your claim would be accepted by ~57% of philosophers https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4898 as well so it's not like it's impossible for such a social scenario to actually obtain.
1. You don’t kill the hermit because you might find yourself fast asleep in that exact spot in the not-so-distant future—potentially even that very afternoon—and you’d prefer not to be killed. One day, your polygenically selected kids might be sleeping there, or your dog, or you might park your car there…
There’s no version of reality where you return to an embryo and someone else decides whether to take you or not from a polygenic portal.
2. We don’t want to normalize the idea that it’s acceptable to murder people while they’re asleep just because they’re “hermits” at the moment. That’s a slippery slope.
3. Even if you knew for sure that you’d never end up sleeping under that tree, and your kids had all been thoroughly warned about the legendary hermit-killing maniac - a tale they’ll pass down for generations - you still wouldn’t want to be punished for committing murder.
4. If you’re safe from the risk of sleeping there, and you’re also immune from punishment, then… well, it still just feels bad to kill a human being, right? Clicking a button on a Web3.0 app to ask a nurse to select Embryo #7 and freeze the rest is worlds apart from “take this gun and prepare yourself for a lifetime of self-inflicted nightmares.”
5. If you’re a psychopath living in a lawless land where you and your kids are safe but random hermits are not - are you sure it’ll stay that way? Lawless lands tend to attract pesky law-lovers who’d love to come in and take over.
6. And if you’re a psychopath living in that same lawless land with only a month to live due to Stage 4 cancer that no one had a chance to diagnose - then sure, maybe from your perspective it seems fine. But I’ll still judge you, because I don’t like lawless lands and I like people who sleep under trees.
I'm skeptical that this reflects your ordinary moral reasoning. Most of your reasons amount sound more like political considerations about coalition-building, not intrinsic moral value.
Do you apply the same reasoning to aiding third-world countries, reducing animal suffering, or other issues that involve groups which you will never find yourself on the opposite side of?
Ordinary reasoning is represented: I don’t kill people first and foremost because I don’t want to, not because it’s “immoral”. I still wouldn’t do it if it was “moral”.
Is there is materialist conception of personhood?
And as for the hard sell of non-materialist conception, I suppose it is hard sell to those to whom anything smacking of non-materialism is hard sell per se.
But I suppose, to the general population, the hardgoing materialism is a harder sell than non-material conception of personhood.
"Ethical Objection: Personhood
Is it really correct to say that you have reduced someone’s risk of breast cancer by 46%, if what you’ve really done is closer to replacing them with a different person who is 46% less likely to have breast cancer?"
I don't see this is a question. It's not "this is an existing embryo which is a potential baby and you're just picking the traits for them", it's "this is a collection of existing embryos which are potential babies and you are selecting out one of them to be born by a checklist".
By picking "embryo with the lower risk of breast cancer" you are choosing to let that one develop into a baby that will be born. The other embryos will either be re-frozen for a later attempt if needed, or destroyed. You haven't "reduced someone's risk of breast cancer" (as if, for example, they were an adult and a new drug was invented that stops cancers developing), you've killed the competitors who might have been born and left the survivor with the least risk to be implanted.
Now, if you had *one* embryo and you were doing a little snippity-snippity with CRISPR or something to go "delete this bit here, stitch in a new bit there", then yeah: you're reducing that (potential) person*'s risk of breast cancer. But that's not what this procedure is doing. The other embryos are perfectly able, if implanted, to develop into babies that could be born. You're killing those embryos or at the very least preventing their natural development by sticking them back in the freezer, so you are taking potential people out of existence.
EDIT: And no, that's not the same argument as "you have therefore to have as many babies as possible to allow all potential people to come into being". These embryos now exist in reality and in potential to be viable pregnancies. They're not theoretical or notional, they're the result of someone's sperm fertilising someone else's eggs and are now ready to follow the path of conception to birth, only you chose to do all this in a petri dish instead of by the body.
*I think embryos have personhood but yeah: dumb old believer in stupid sky fairy story here.
Thank you for saying this! I don’t think CRISPR would work on any stage but the zygote (well, in the case of something like cystic fibrosis maybe if half the person’s cells are able to produce the missing protein then the effects of CF wouldn’t be as devastating). But anyways I consider IVF immoral so what do I know. It really makes me sad to see all these rationalists’ inconsistencies in moral reasoning and reminds me that as much as I find interesting a lot of content on this blog the fundamental framework is so different we might as well be living in different galaxies (though Father Brown would remind me that the natural law applies everywhere in the universe). We can’t have honey apparently because of bee suffering but creating embryos just to let them die is a-ok!
Ah yeah, I got into trouble with a former member of the commentariat here because of my Catholic objections to IVF (it was a personal family thing with them so naturally they did feel hurt).
I mean, I think the people currently proposing this do have the best intentions about healthy babies first (get rid of the hereditary diseases) and then 'who could object to smart, happy babies?'
But it's not going to stop there, because it never stops there. The particular genetic selection company may be the first one Scott heard of offering to sell hair/eye colour selection, but a couple years back there was at least one chain of fertility/IVF clinics offering this as a deluxe option for clients.
The fertility industry is an industry, and the purpose of business is to make money. So if people want purple eyed kids with silver coloured hair and six fingers on each foot (yes, I said "foot") and are seven feet tall, and the parents have the money to pay for it, that's what they'll get.
Wait, is your conception of the abortion debate that it's a debate between two sides who both have competing materialist conceptions of personhood? This would be a surprise to me, as I don't think anybody but the most hardcore of transhumanist/rationalist/atheists have a purely materialist conception of personhood.
The anti abortion side is a pretty straightforward metaphysical claim. The soul exists, and is created at conception.
Meanwhile the pro-abortion rights side contains dozens of competing definitions and thresholds of personhood, nearly all of them with some nonmaterialist component at their heart (e.g. "personhood only applies to living things" or "personhood only applies to humans" or "personhood only applies to fetuses post-viability" or "personhood only applies after it exits the womb" or "the threshold for personhood is whether the fetus has nervous system that can respond to external pain") The purely materialist conception (one example is purely physical capacity for information processing, e.g. IIT) is hardly held by anybody except a minorities of principled philosophers and rationalists. And to be honest I think even most of these are fundamentally metaphysical claims, with the possible exception of "personhood simply doesn't exist" (which I personally disqualify on the basis that it seems to imply that ethics don't exist either, which in that case, what's the point of arguing about the ethics of killing a fetus)
Do shrimps have personhood? Because Bulldog, for one, is very much active in ending shrimp suffering and getting us to treat shrimps as if they have rights.
As humans, we have a long, long history of treating "this set of us is fine and are people, those set of them are not fine and are not people so we can do what we like to them and that's okay, we're not doing anything wrong because they're not people".
Making personhood a revocable legal status that can be granted and taken away at whim is not a good precedent.
There's already a push for miscarriage leave here in Ireland (we don't yet have a legal entitlement to such, although there is for a stillbirth). So is a seven week old or twelve week old foetus a baby or not? If you want it, it's a baby and you are a grieving expectant mother if it dies. If you don't want it, it's a clump of cells and you are entitled to terminate that pregnancy and expel the contents of the uterus.
"Maybe baby" is not a great way to think about this entire topic, because if we're worrying about AI rights as future sentient beings, we're already laying the legal and social groundwork for "aw, that ain't no person if it's inconvenient for you for them to be a person".
And I don't think it'll stick at the foetus, either. We've done the "adult human but not a person" thing already in several instances, why not in the Brave New World now the unedited, unselected, stupid (because everyone is supposed to be 115 IQ which is the new normal, not a dumb old 105 IQ clod) human-looking animals are not in possession of personhood as an innate property of their humanity, so we don't have to worry about them. In fact, the kindest thing to do is put them down humanely, like we do with feral animal populations. They just can't have a decent quality of life under the circumstances that society demands of its citizens, they're too lacking.
Uh...looking socially at how miscarriage has been historically treated, the variability of personhood is already well-established. Exodus, for example, provides a fine as the appropriate punishment for someone ending up with a miscarriage from being hit in someone else's fight.
I can't remotely join you on the idea that eight cells has the moral personhood of a newborn baby. I can clarify that IVF doesn't generally any longer involve implanting more than one embryo at a time.
I can also add the reality check that women have to still biologically produce the eggs to be fertilized and that the multiple and high levels of hormones used to produce that many eggs at once is an intense and painful experience and the numbers of eggs that can be produced in any one cycle is quite limited. The average number retrieved in each cycle is 8-14.
"Retrieval" is a surgical procedure under general anesthesia and the process leading up to it is hard and prolonged and demanding. Not all the eggs retrieved will be viable on their own (ie, before being fertilized), others will not grow after being fertilized. It's a long, slow process in other words, and one that does not yield up bunches and bunches viable eggs or embryos. It's extremely hard on women in particular, physically and psychologically.
After you replied, I addressed the question of the embryo's moral value in response to Scott's comment.
As for IVF and multiple implantation: noted, but I hope you realize that this reinforces my point about the seriousness of PS relative to standard IVF.
Regarding retrieval: yes, that's how it currently works, but there's a lot of effort going toward widening that bottleneck. For example, Jonathan Anomaly is banking on in-vitro gametogenesis so that "tens of thousands" of embryos can be created from a single vial of blood.
https://youtu.be/uvPDbOHSS4M?t=679
And will we then have "tens of thousands" of births? I'm thinking "Hell, no!" so we now have the potential for massacres in a test tube.
Ain't science wonderful! Shame our moral intuitions can't remotely keep up with our technological ability.
See how easily we've moved from "prevent preventable hereditary diseases" to "mass produce humans, mass murder humans, but all in the clean scientific way not the messy old King Herod way".
A poem by Charles Causley:
https://allpoetry.com/Innocent's-Song
Innocent's Song
Who's that knocking on the window,
Who's that standing at the door,
What are all those presents
Lying on the kitchen floor?
Who is the smiling stranger
With hair as white as gin,
What is he doing with the children
And who could have let him in?
Why has he rubies on his fingers,
A cold, cold crown on his head,
Why, when he caws his carol,
Does the salty snow run red?
Why does he ferry my fireside
As a spider on a thread,
His fingers made of fuses
And his tongue of gingerbread?
Why does the world before him
Melt in a million suns,
Why do his yellow, yearning eyes
Burn like saffron buns?
Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:
Herod is his name.
It's not a massacre because they're not people. You're engaging in circular reasoning.
Trying to equate the moral worth of embryos with already-born humans is only an insult to the latter. It is not convincing to people who don't already fully agree with you.
And poems are not arguments at all.
We're shaping up for a nice fight, and you are leading off with "poetry? what good that? it not maths!" for an appeal to those who love words.
Dickens wrote an entire novel called "Hard Times" which included a pop at exactly this attitude:
‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.
Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind—no, sir!
...‘Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. ‘That’s it! You are never to fancy.’
‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’
‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman. And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.’
It's not just those who love words - we also care about whether those words contain truth. Beauty is well and good but you can't build a moral system out of it, and shouldn't try.
Now, let's get on to personhood.
"Trying to equate the moral worth of embryos with already-born humans is only an insult to the latter."
I am given to understand that there was a very handy legal decision about who are and are not persons.
You see that human-shaped object standing over there? It looks like an adult human and so that's a person? Oh no, my friend, you are gravely mistaken: that is property, like a shovel or a kitchen table or a horse, and trying to equate the moral worth of property with already-born humans is only an insult to the latter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott
"On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion. Taney ruled, with three major issues, that:
- Any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States, according to the U.S. Constitution.
- The Ordinance of 1787 could not confer either freedom or citizenship within the Northwest Territory to non-white individuals.
- The provisions of the Act of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise, were voided as a legislative act, since the act exceeded the powers of Congress, insofar as it attempted to exclude slavery and impart freedom and citizenship to non-white persons in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase.
The Court had ruled that African Americans had no claim to freedom or citizenship. Since they were not citizens, they did not possess the legal standing to bring suit in a federal court. As slaves were private property, Congress did not have the power to regulate slavery in the territories and could not revoke a slave owner's rights based on where he lived. This decision nullified the essence of the Missouri Compromise, which divided territories into jurisdictions either free or slave. Speaking for the majority, Taney ruled that because Scott was considered the private property of his owners, he was subject to the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the taking of property from its owner "without due process"."
An earlier interpretation estimated that such property was the equivalent of three-fifths of a real person, but of course that's not a real person in total. Saying that a three-fifths person is of equal moral worth with already-born full five-fifths person humans is only an insult to the latter, is it not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
"In the U.S. Constitution, the Three-fifths Compromise is part of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
I know you by the company you keep.
Irrelevant (and a rather tired argument, I might add).
Yes, it is bad to claim that a person is not a person. It is not bad to claim that a non-person is a not a person. Once again, it matters whether your words are true.
If you tell slaves they're not people, they can tell you that's not true. In fact, it even demonstrates something if they tell you that it *is* true, because it shows they can understand the idea.
In contrast, if you tell an embryo it is not a person, it won't respond because it has no hope of even understanding the question no matter how hard you try to educate it. At the stage at which we'd be talking about IVF, in particular, they have less brain than a fish.
> I know you by the company you keep.
Aren't you Catholic? I don't think guilt by association is the card you want to play, especially if we're going to bring in things that happened before anyone here was born.
Mostly orthogonal to your point, but I’ve met some couples who use polygenic risk scoring without destroying any embryos. They use the risk scores to inform the ordering of their IVF implantations.
One of these couples reasons along the lines of: “If my child has an elevated chance of breast cancer, then it’s better for them to be born later and hence closer to its cure.“
That's funny (but reasonable!). Do they actually plan to implant all of them? I've always wondered if there are ivf clinics (or patients) that are able to factor in the worldview that embryos have moral standing
For one of the two couples, I overheard them saying that they will implant all embryos at an Orchid Health presentation, because it’s important for IVF to be compatible with their religious beliefs.
The other couple is Malcolm and Simone Collins, they just posted about this on X recently.
beginning at fertilization, a human embryo has moral value that's similar in magnitude to a newborn baby […]
Consequently, that should make EAs very reluctant to advocate [embryonic destruction]
I don’t envision any reluctance: most Effective Altruists are hedonic utilitarians and I think would very straight forwardly reject your argument using their moral framework.
Hedonic utilitarians believe that moral value lies in the sum total of pleasure experienced minus pain experienced across time and space.
Early stage embryos (dozen cell structure) don’t feel pain or pleasure so under this moral framework destroying them is not directly immoral. In fact, hedonic utilitarians will reason that under resource constraints, it’s better to selectively choose the embryos that create people likely to have higher hedonic utility.
(disclaimer: I’m not a hedonic utilitarian)
ref your disclaimer, I'm curious, what are your personal views?
I disagree with hedonic utilitarianism because people and other beings can have lives that are net negative from a hedonic perspective, but they still find to be meaningful and worthwhile. It would be wrong to tell these people that it would be better that they were never born (they would disagree, even if a negative utilitarian would tell them they are “delusional”). Furthermore, I am even skeptical about whether pain and pleasure are inherently meaningful. After all, these are “arbitrarily” evolved signals from an ancestral environment we no longer inhabit. When we have the technology to edit such signals, should we in fact coerce all people into wire-heading in a pleasure pod?
Haven’t deeply thought through my moral philosophy, but I’m certainly a consequentialist, I highly value “survival”, and I consider “myself” to also be my descendants (e.g. my descendants are my New Game+, and I am a New Game+ for my ancestors).
I was wondering about coercive wire-heading, that seems to be the most obvious issue with hedonic utilitarianism.
There is also the question of what this evolutionary signal is _to_. Consciousness? If causing harm to others is bad in part because of this pain signal, it seems there is _some_ inherent meaning, although I wouldn't count myself as a pro wire-heading hedonic utilitarian either.
Survival for survival's sake is what cancer is though, I feel like this has to bottom out in "meaning" somehow. But maybe that is a hard-problem-of-conscioussness-complete problem.
"cancer == survival for survival's sake" is a fun analogy haha
I'll keep that in mind as I flesh this system out.
So here’s the thing. Cancers don’t actually survive for long because they destroy the organism they parasitize. So a perhaps long term view on survival necessitates a “survival, with productivity and flourishing whenever the era/circumstances allow” approach. Only be a cancer if you need to
I think that's reasonable and fair, but I still don't think "survival" is inherently any good either, there has to be a consciousness experiencer that does the surviving.
I don't think most EAs are hedonic utilitarians - most are utilitarian or utilitarian-leaning consequentialists (I think the 2019 survey was the last one to have this data, where just under 70% were utilitarian consequentialists), but I think further qualifying with 'hedonic' would cut that down a lot, at least in the traditional sense where experience is the *only* thing that matters (and even more so in the pleasure/pain sense you talk about below). I'm not aware of any solid data, but my guess would be that less than half of utilitarian or utilitarian-leaning EA consequentialists are pure hedonic utilitarians.
Thanks for your correction, and for pulling up the EA survey stat. Do you know how typical EA utilitarianians add more nuance beyond hedonic utility in this context? Words that come to mind include "flourishing", "personal preferences", and QALYs but not sure if this is how people would typically frame their utility functions.
I think some form of pluralism is fairly common (e.g, hedonistic and preference combined). I also think it's fairly common not to have a specific utility function - you could frame that as being uncertain about which things matter fundamentally and which are instrumental. Some words I'd add might include 'meaning', 'fulfilment', 'self-determination' and the generic 'welfare'. I'm not that sure how typical they are, though; they're based purely on my personal impressions.
Although a lot of EAs are hedonic or hedonic-leaning utilitarians, I consider EA's association with careful analysis to be more central to its identity than its association with hedonic utilitarianism.
For anyone who disagrees, I'm revoking their license to say "critiques of EA are necessarily critiques of individual EAs", because that would be smuggling a lot of philosophical baggage into their definition of EA.
I've never heard of the names Gene Smith or Jonathan Anomaly. Are those people's actual names or is it the title of some blogs? If the former, that's some serious nominative determinism.
Gene Smith is a fake blog name. IIRC, Jonathan legally changed his name to Anomaly but it is not his birth name.
I think it's worth mentioning that a very large number of embryos fail to develop even in natural pregnancy. I've seen people argue about the figures, so I'm not sure what the exact percentage is, but it's probably pretty high (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28580126/).
This doesn't directly contradict your point, (embryo selection could still theoretically increase the number of discarded embryos) but it does confuse me. Would moral standing at conception suggest that we should *only* perform IVF and ban regular conception to avoid the associated death? (Given the current popularity of non-IVF conception surely it is the greater cause of embryo death?) Would embryonic personhood then be comparable not with selection, but CRISPR modification?
Right, it's repugnant conclusions like this - that in order to avoid creating naturally doomed embryos, the only ethical choice is invasive and alienating procedures like IVF - that are my strongest reason for not being too serious about embryonic value/personhood/rights. That's crazy.
I can see both sides of the argument otherwise. I suppose I come down in a gray area, where I'm uncomfortable enough with IVF for embryonic personhood reasons (and miserable maternal procedure reasons) that I probably wouldn't do it myself unless I were desperate - but there are plenty of people who are understandably desperate enough that I think the value they gain from it outweighs the small value/chance of personhood of the embryos lost.
Perhaps I've missed something, but I think we should use whichever method has the higher implantation rate (after accounting for quality of embryos, age of the woman, etc.). I would be *very* surprised if that was IVF instead of natural pregnancy, but I'm willing to follow the argument where the data leads it, regardless.
EDIT: You asked about banning one or the other, specifically, so I want to address that explicitly. Assuming that natural pregnancy is more reliable than IVF, I don't necessarily think IVF should be banned, because it's not clear to me that it's worse for a person to (naturally, painlessly) die at two weeks old than to not be born at all. That might sound strange, but I think that denying that preference would imply stringent antinatalism.
Yes, this exactly. To me, the personhood argument is the ballgame.
And also, have you seen the movie Gattaca? Because that's the dystopian future we're taking about.
The movie Gattaca was a utopia for everybody except the protagonist.
If the protagonist's parents had been responsible like apparently everybody else and had a genetically screened baby, then he wouldn't have had any problems.
The movie focuses on his problem that he can't get the job he wants, but the underlying far bigger problem is that he has a genetic defect which may cause him to drop dead in his thirties.
The solution to "it sucks if some people aren't genetically engineered" isn't "nobody should be genetically engineered", it's "everybody should be genetically engineered".
The intuition that personhood begins at conception is one I can understand, even if I don't personally share it.
But it does run into the empirical observation that north of 50% of conceptions are spontaneously aborted (a point also raised by Charles Midi).
I would genuinely welcome some exposition on how you reconcile that with your feeling that conception is personhood.
Where exactly is the conflict? The infant mortality rate also used to be a significant fraction of total infants born, humanity has a poor track record of perceiving moral catastrophes in a timely manner, and embryos are difficult to empathize with.
It doesn't **necessarily** have a conflict, depending on why you pinpoint conception as the origin of life, and if you believe in soul.
If you DO believe in a soul, then it suggests that God values souls so little that He is willing to kill half of them even before the cells begin differentiating. On the one hand, that seems like far, FAR higher level of tolerance for "natural evil" than most religious folks normally have. But if God thinks it's okay, then why shouldn't we?
I also note that you are saying "embryo" rather than "zygote"; I'm not sure if you're aware of the distinction. Briefly, a zygote is still just a mass of undifferentiated cells, which perhaps could be coaxed into differentiating and becoming an embryo (often this process fails, which is why so many concepti are spontaneously aborted). But if you feel a zygote has moral worth, then what about pluripotent stem cells that have been reprogrammed from adult tissue? They seem (to me, at least) to have just as much ability to develop into an embryo and later human (and that's been done with other animals, even if not humans, so this isn't a theoretical objection).
I guess, by analogy, this is like the debate over how many grains of sand it takes to constitute a "pile". Obviously, it's trying to map a bright-line definition onto a fuzzy word, and so there's going to be some ambiguity and resulting disagreement. But from my perspective it looks like you're saying "a single grain is enough to make a pile"... I admit that it has a certain logical coherence if I squint, but it's hard for me to fully understand in terms of any of the other things I'd normally care about.
I think we're in agreement (as per your response to Midi) that "dying" at this stage isn't a great tragedy... but in that case, why not begin assigning moral worth (or calling it a 'pile') at the embryo stage, or implantation, or viability? I remain genuinely curious about what you see as the salient differences.
At what point do identical twins become different people?
Or, conversely, when do chimeras become a single person?
I think they become different people once the embryo splits.
I asked ChatGPT o3 about it:
Q: Hi ChatGPT! I hope your early morning is going well. Can you please tell me how many clearly distinct arguments there are in the interminable abortion debate? I realize that these can be combined into a (roughly) exponential number of stances, but, for _just_ the distinct arguments, how many are there? Many Thanks!
A: There isn’t a canonical count—philosophers and legal theorists carve the terrain differently—but you can compress the debate into ~18 argument families. Most specific positions are combinations of these.
Core families (one-liners):
1. Biological humanity → full moral status. Human life begins at conception; killing it is wrong. (SEP overview.)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
2. Psychological personhood criteria. Rights track capacities (consciousness, interests, rationality); early fetuses lack them. (Tooley.)
JSTOR
3. Potentiality / “future like ours.” What’s wrong with killing is depriving a valuable future; abortion (usually) does that. (Marquis.)
edX
4. Bodily autonomy. Even if the fetus is a person, no one may conscript another’s body (the “violinist” case). (Thomson.)
rintintin.colorado.edu
5. Responsibility for pregnancy. Voluntary risk-taking (sex) can create obligations that limit abortion claims; dissenters dispute this. (Discussion in SEP.)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
6. Self-defense / double effect. Life- or health-saving interventions can be justified even if fetal death is a foreseen side-effect. (Foot; SEP.)
PhilPapers
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
7. Gradualism & thresholds. Moral status may increase with development (heartbeat, brain activity, consciousness, viability). (IEP/SEP surveys.)
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
8. Viability as a legal/moral line. Before viability state power is weaker; after, stronger (contested and technology-dependent). (Roe/Casey/Dobbs.)
Justia Law
Library of Congress Tile
Supreme Court
9. Equality/anti-subordination. Compulsory pregnancy undermines women’s equal citizenship and life-planning. (Casey’s reliance interests; commentary.)
Library of Congress Tile
10. Privacy/liberty vs. state interests. Liberty (privacy) grounds a right to decide; opponents stress the state’s interest in “potential life.” (Roe/Casey/Dobbs.)
Justia Law
Library of Congress Tile
Supreme Court
11. Public-health / harm-reduction. Restricting access doesn’t end abortion; it makes it less safe and worsens health outcomes. (WHO, CDC, ACOG.)
World Health Organization
CDC
ACOG
12. Safety comparison. Legal abortion (especially early) is far safer than childbirth; policy should reflect that. (ACOG.)
ACOG
13. Moral uncertainty / risk. Given deep disagreement, precaution (for or against abortion) may supply defeasible reasons. (Moller.)
Squarespace
14. Fetal pain. Some argue pain perception grounds later limits; mainstream reviews place the onset ≥24–25 weeks and dispute earlier claims. (RCOG/ACOG.)
rcog.org.uk
ACOG
15. Disability-rights (“expressivist”) critique. Selective abortion can convey harmful social messages about disabled lives. (Parens & Asch and successors.)
PubMed
16. Sex-selection / demographic harms. Even if abortion is generally permitted, selection for sex is challenged on justice/inequality grounds. (Ethics literature reviews.)
University of Birmingham
17. Socio-economic consequences. Denial of wanted abortion increases financial distress and harms health; access improves life outcomes. (Turnaway Study, NBER.)
NBER
ANSIRH
18. Paternal interests & parental obligations. Disputes over the moral/legal claims of putative fathers and over duties to gestate/adopt-out rather than abort. (Surveyed in SEP.)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
If you like, I can map these into a matrix showing how different policy packages (e.g., “early liberal, late restrictive,” “health-only exceptions,” etc.) combine subsets of these arguments.
What was the purpose of this?
To let people see all the time-worn arguments in this interminable debate and decide if they were adding anything new. Many Thanks for your question!
I don't think this was helpful. I wasn't talking about abortion; I was talking about a specific form of IVF. Although they share some philosophical considerations, the issues are substantially different.
Even if they were very similar, copy-pasting from ChatGPT with no context and no apparent attempt to format your answer is spammy.
Many Thanks! I disagree. I think most of the downstream thread (thread tree?) is substantially identical to the interminable abortion debate. Yes, there are considerations which are unique to embryo selection, but a lot of the comments don't address these considerations. The listing of the old arguments gives a compact form in which people can see:
- Whether their arguments introduce anything new or not
- Whether they wish to simply endorse or oppose one or more of the existing arguments
- Whether they have overlooked one of the old arguments that they want to endorse or oppose
Don't humans acquire moral value when we believe they do? Birth seems more convenient than conception to me and either are tenable and consistent given they are not aware and do not suffer.
Your first point sounds like a particularly naive or extreme form of moral relativism. What's the relevant scale for "we"? Also, is there really nothing so abhorrent that it is morally wrong, regardless of what we believe about it?
Your second point seems to deny that (e.g.) a 30-week-old fetus is not conscious or capable of suffering, which is badly wrong. The birth canal does not bestow consciousness.
I'm sorry if I've misunderstood either of your points--I've spent a lot of time responding to comments today, so I might not be reading yours with a clear mind.
How people choose to use the word morality is up to their desires and preferences and successful communication will rely on intersubjective agreement about when to deploy moral terms. You can of course define morality as something not dependent on human beliefs but that definition itself will rely on human beliefs.
What requires humans having moral value is other humans deeming them to have moral value. Nothing more, nothing less.
Three possible objections I can think of that you don't discuss:
1. You mention how IVF is expensive and very unpleasant, but it might also just have negative effects on the embryo by itself (I know zeta_globin on Twitter is always banging on about this). If we're lucky the selection might yield a net improvement? I don't know, I don't really have enough knowledge here to make this argument or know how strong it is, but I've seen it out there so I thought I should mention it.
2. This is another argument I'm stealing from *someone*, but I don't know who (I remember asking in the comments here once and someone said it was the Unabomber, but I could not in fact find it in the Unabomber manifesto). So far it doesn't sound like this is allowing any sort of selection on personality traits (unless one considers IQ a personality trait). I'm mildly worried about the possibility of selection for agreeableness. That is, I'm worried that parents might select for agreeableness in the hopes of having an easier-to-raise kid, but that this occurring on a large scale might lead to increased conformism that holds back humanity. (Though selection on some other personality traits sounds pretty nice -- who doesn't want lower neuroticism or higher conscientiousness?) (I guess arguably this is covered under the "Selection" category, but it's a little different, I think, in that it's not purely individual.)
3. I can't find it at the moment, and this is even more arguably already covered under the "Selection" category, but I remember an old blog post by Ozy about the possibility of an even more extreme form of the downsides under "Selection" -- i.e., that awful parents might completely disregard their child's welfare in their selection (think of what's happened to certain dog breeds, bred for aesthetics). Like, abusive parents exist, so! Not sure how great that is as an argument because it strikes me as perhaps a bit too "criminals use cars", but thought it was worth mentioning (can anyone find the post? For some reason I can't find it right now!).
For 2, there are parents who would select both ways there: low agreeableness means rejecting groupthink and may favor economic success.
I expect extreme forms of 3 would be banned, or be covered by existing laws against child abuse.
Yes, #3 is a good point -- if this becomes generally used/accepted (and hopefully not banned), laws around it will (hopefully) be made to cover this sort of thing.
For #2 that is a counterbalancing factor, but if you get clustering then maybe there's a problem? OTOH, selection on higher IQ -- which is generally desirable -- would probably do a bit to mitigate that...
Natural forms of #3 are, to my knowledge, not illegal currently: AFAIK you are fully within your legal rights to have a child even if you know they will (or likely will) have a serious disability or fatal disease. For example, the couple in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/health/pompe-disease-treatment.html
I think that's because preventing that legally would violate other rights, such as bodily autonomy.
I was playing with the Herasight widget for various conditions (plus IQ), and it tells me the expected outcomes for 5, 10, or 20 embryos estimated by their genetic predictors. But I don't know what the implications of these values are. Does this imply they can select the best out of 5, 10, or 20 embryos to obtain the lowest liability (R-squared for risk variance) for that condition? I assume that's what they're claiming, but without a comparison of liability scores between the embryo counts. If not, what are they trying to prove with this widget.
They're not claiming that they can select the best with certainty, they're making a probabilistic claim that they'll do, on average, that much better than average.
If you haven't given them a real set of embryos, then they're simulating embryos with a normal distribution. For example, if two IQ 100 people marry each other, then on average their children will center around IQ 100 with some variance. I don't know exactly what that variance is, but they do and they've calculated it. Maybe on average, five embryos will range from 90 - 110. So if they could always choose perfectly, they could pick the 110 one and get you 10 points above average. But since they can't choose perfectly, they only expect to get you 5 points above average.
That's what I would have expected. But the widget tells me that with 20 embryos from 2 European parents whose IQs are 100, we can expect their child's IQ to be plus or minus half a standard deviation above or below the parents. The kid could have an IQ of between 93 and 108. I don't think they're claiming that, but somebody needs to talk to marketing about improving their value proposition. ;-)
> What if they selected your brother for everything great, then had you naturally?
This is basically the plot of Gattaca, except they had the first child naturally, regretted it, then used genetic selection for their second.
I was playing with their widget. It displays the values of the expected outcomes for 5, 10, or 20 embryos estimated by their genetic predictors. I presume they're claiming they can select the best of 5, 10, or 20 embryos—but it doesn't give me a readout of liability scores. So I can't really make a risk/benefit calculation. Am I missing something obvious here?
Another (tongue in cheek) objection. Your parents will be absolute morons compared to you at some point. You’ll be a mopey 14 year old screaming at your parents for not making obvious stock market picks and running their own companies.
On average, smart parents' children will be less smart than they are, because of regression to the mean. Currently, I think this technology just helps you tread water. I agree that this will be true in 10 or 20 years when the technology is much better.
I’m not sure what the overlap between below 100 IQ and IVF is, but regression to the mean + IVF would be a boon for a lot of people
People with 150 IQs and 100 IQ parents usually still love/like their parents and dont care much about their intelligence.
My understanding is that nobody actually has 150 IQ
150 IQ is 1 in 2000.
150 IQ is 3.3 SD above the mean. From an eyeball at a statistical table, 1 in 2000 people are this smart or smarter. And several of them may be reading this blog :)
see also: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/464f7a04-1147-4eeb-8550-1608fcc78d92
We need to distinguish between *having* 150 IQ and *measuring* it.
If 150 IQ is 1 in 2000, then obviously there are many people who have it. They are rare in the population, to the degree that many people probably never met one of them in person. But they may be concentrated in some places, for example some universities, so it wouldn't be impossible to know many of them.
How to make an IQ test that reliably distinguishes between e.g. 140 IQ and 150 IQ, that is a different question, and maybe there is no such test yet, because it would be too expensive to make it. To test the levels at "1 in 2000", you would need maybe 20 000 test subjects (for each age group!) to make it statistically valid, and maybe no one has spent enough money to actually do it.
So I'd say that there are many people with IQ 150+ out there, but in practice they are hard to distinguish from people with IQ 140 of which there are many more.
I'm not sure how you might have come to that understanding. As other commenters noted, just assuming a mean/std of 100/16 (which is extremely reasonable, since the test is normed that way by design) puts 1 in 1000 people at 150+ (meaning 300,000 in the USA alone).
But in addition to that, there are multiple studies confirming at least the _existence_ of some people scoring that high. Eg Harmon 1961 collected scores for 80% of PhDs awarded in 1958, and found a mean of 130 for physicists; it's not hard to imagine that at least some of them were 1.3 SD over that mean. Roe 1953 administered tests directly, and found multiple people over 150.
Did you mean some other number, by chance? The original Stanford-Binet test capped out at around 170, and certainly the s.e.m. is so high at that point that it's extremely difficult to compare two individuals in that range _with each other_ (e.g. Terrance Tao vs Christopher Hirata). But I think it's pretty obvious that at least some people genuinely score that high, and have produced work to match it.
Typically children of this sort are much more interesting in doing things in their own lives rather than controlling what they do with their parents lives. They're building full-flow 2 stage model rockets with landing capability rather than crying to their parents that they aren't supermen.
Teenagers feel this way about their parents regardless of the real relationship between their levels of intelligence, it'll be nice for them to actually be right about being smarter for a change.
A not-at-all joking response: There will always come a point at which your parents are morons compared to you, unless one of you dies first. Age and senescence come for us all (so far) and cognitive ability is not spared.
The main thing I'm hoping for from this research is that it gets us closer to adult genome editing. It'll be really awkward if I'm in my 40s and there are 10 year olds smarter than me (Assuming AGI doesn't happen by then and render genetics completely moot).
> "but say that it most people gain 1-4 years"
The extra "it" seems to be a mistake.
If we're really concerned about improving our future children's genes, it's worth noting that compared to IVF and embryo selection choosing a partner with strong genetic traits (e.g. intelligence, health, height) would have a far larger impact.
The genetic variation between potential partners is much wider than the small variation among embryos from the same couple. So if you believe improving genetic outcomes is a moral good, does choosing a partner for love or chemistry over heritable traits amount to prioritizing our own happiness over our future child's potential?
I feel like some people already do this! Prioritizing someone hot/smart/healthy/wealthy over other people that might be nicer to you seems like a commonly discussed phenomenon
When i was dating many of my peers got genetic testing to screen for heritable disease that they might be a carrier for. There was a service that saved the results and you could then check potential partners for the same recessive disease. It would tell if you are both carriers but not what specific disease.
I think those traits are typically considered for their first-order effects on the relationship, or *maybe* for their relevance for providing during the reproductive years, not for their genetic effects on the offspring.
I don't think choosing partners for the genetic traits we want our kids to have is at all a commonly discussed phenomenon.
I sure never thought about it. Both of my serious relationships were with people who had siblings with relatively common heritable disorders. I was basically like "huh weird, I guess that's cool/sucks," and not once did it cross my mind that it could affect my potential kids.
Arranged marriages have been the norm throughout history. And still are the norm in many nations.
Yes, I can see how parents could be more scientific about what is best for their child and children's children
Even less data on multi-racial / mixed-race genomes. Multi-racial couples are out of distribution for these machine learning models and plausibly will get the least value from these embyronic screening services.
We don't currently understand much about genetic interactions, either because they rarely happen or because our current tools aren't good enough to detect them. Since embryo selection can only use the genetics we understand, interactions aren't relevant here, and predicting mixed race couples works fine using what we know about the component races.
So for example, on Herasight's calculator, an Asian couple with five embryos can gain 4.1 IQ points, a white couple can gain 5.3 IQ points, and a mixed white-Asian couple can gain 4.8 IQ points - right in between.
Can't see this leading to anything but dystopia if it pans out. Saying that about a lot of new developments nowadays.
https://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/
This is very horrible. Ghastly!
Warning, commenting policy here is that you have to provide arguments for an assertion, please do this in the future or don't comment.
I don’t care what your policy is. You posted on a public forum. I’m free to respond. If you don’t like others’ opinions, don’t post.
And he's free to ban you for being a stupid jerk. My argument for the assertion that you are a stupid jerk is that you didn't provide arguments for your assertion, refused to do so when he asked you to, and said you don't care about his preferences.
It’s an OPINION.
I didn’t make a factual claim. Jesus, how can people not distinguish between an opinion and a factual claim?
You can’t cite research to prove whether something is ghastly/ghoulish.
I think it’s ghoulish. I have a right to think that, and to say that.
He has a right to block me, if he dislikes my opinion. I really don’t care. I made my statement.
I think making designer babies is a very bad thing that will lead humanity into a very troubling future.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Brave New World, but perhaps you should.
Opinions still have an internal logic to them, unless you are claiming to have arrived at yours by rolling dice. If you hope to convince people to adopt yours, you will generally need to engage with that internal logic. For example, you could say *why* you think this will lead to "a very troubling future", or what you think will be troubling about it.
As it happens, I *have* read Brave New World, but to my recollection it objects to nonintellectual hedonism and the creation of a low-intelligence underclass. If you also object to creating healthier, more intelligent people, and think Brave New World is criticising that goal, them I think you have misread the text.
>the creation of a low-intelligence underclass.
The creation of a high-intelligence upperclass implies the creation of a low-intelligence underclass, even if no active measures are taken towards the latter. Implying it's an intentional, active process may be a POSIWID fallacy because nobody is proposing to bathe embryos in an alcoholic solution or whatever exact mechanism BNW offered, but the overall result is bound to happen anyway.
It turns humans into products. It creates rigid castes divided by intelligence level. It eliminates family structure. It’s a horrifying dystopian world that we are running to as fast as we can.
If you do not understand that BNW was critical of producing babies as a product, instead of as a part of a family, I think you misread the text.
How do you feel about selecting for implantation, out of two embryos, the one which does not have trisomy 21?
How would you feel about magically removing the third copy of 21 instead?
You're missing the point. People who need to use IVF because they cannot naturally conceive a baby will of course seek to have a healthy child if possible. But that's not what this whole piece is about: It is about people deciding to put a woman through the painful and difficult IVF process just so they can get an athletic kid with blue eyes or whatever.
It's really disingenuous to pretend trying to have a healthy child free of a terrible disease is the same thing as choosing a kid who is tall.
And to use IVF tech when there's no infertility problem is ethically questionable.
There are dozens of people with your opinion participating in the conversation here. Nobody cares that you have this opinion, but this space is used for discussion. The reaction you're getting is not because anyone disagrees with you or feels you shouldn't be allowed a voice, but because you're treating this like a facebook post. You can think and say a lot more here than most other places; you're just expected to contribute signal, not meaningless noise.
From your comment, I infer that you don't support a woman's right to choose which embryo is implanted into her body... is that correct?
You went off into that direction all by yourself.
but you still didn't answer the question... if you don't support a woman's right to choose what goes into her body, just say so.
(in case it's not clear, this is, indeed, a rhetorical device, pitting one purported value against another in an attempt to get you to make a coherent argument, rather than just being enraged)
An issue that I have yet to see addressed well enough is how sure are we that there is no added developmental risk from the procedure itself that would counterweight the benefits, especially when the benefits are "add an expected 4 IQ points" rather than "not have CF". The risks I'm thinking are mostly:
1) Stress to the embryo from the sampling, either in inducing developmental mispatterning (more likely) or de novo mutations
2) Stress to the embryo and the mother from the IVF (development/mutations for the embryo, hormonal and immune signaling mess for the mom), if comparing against in vivo fertilization
There just seem to be so many risks there that even if each one is very tiny change in odds because doctors optimized it excellently, they should add up to more than 4 IQ points.
Yes, these are real life risks. I don't know how big they are.
Polygenic selection isn’t just a tweak to medicine or parenting. It’s a decision about who gets to exist, and why. But this conversation keeps retreading familiar grooves without confronting the ontological vertigo this new technology introduces.
We’re not choosing a school or a tutor; we’re choosing which possible person becomes our child. That crosses a metaphysical threshold. Potential humans are now compared probabilistically—not for life or death, but for entrance into life itself. And this comparison is based on traits that increasingly resemble KPIs: IQ, BMI, schizophrenia risk, even eye color. That's person-as-product, full stop.
We need plainer language for what’s happening. The core ethical shift isn’t “screening embryos” or “preventing disease.” It’s that the value of a life becomes a function of its forecasted traits. And you know once that logic takes hold, it won’t stay confined to embryos.
The risk isn't Gattaca-style coercion. I'm more worried about soft cultural convergence. No laws required. Just dashboards, rankings, and best practices. And because it feels like choice, not imposition, no one will notice the narrowing until it’s a fait accompli.
Maybe this tech does increase aggregate well-being. But it also reshapes the moral substrate beneath our choices. When you start selecting children the way you select college applicants, your deciding what kind of soul you think is worth betting on.
Jesus H. Christ.
Is this also true when you take prenatal vitamins to prevent spinal deformity? Isn't that selecting for children who don't have spinal deformity over those who do? Or that the value of a life without spinal deformity is more than one with it? Should we ban prenatal vitamins?
I think there’s a category error here. Taking prenatal vitamins supports the development of a child who already exists. Polygenic selection chooses which possible child gets to exist at all. The former is about nurturing; the latter is about filtering.
Once we’re filtering not for catastrophic disease, but for probabilistic forecasts of intelligence, temperament, or BMI, we’ve crossed from medicine into metaphysics -- defining what kinds of human potential are “worthwhile.” That ain't just banning vitamins.
What happens when the logic of actuarial triage becomes our primary mode of making people?
What you call "catastrophic disease" is also a value judgement. It's a very common value, but saying it's better for a child not to have a spinal deformity is just as much a decision about what kind of lives should be lived as selecting based on predicted IQ.
Not all value judgments are equally loaded. Shifting from healing a child to curating one begins to apply a logic of comparative worth to potential lives. If we’re going to do that, we should at least be honest about what it is.
I'm not sure what you mean by "loaded", but keeping your child from being born with a spinal deformity is absolutely applying a logic of comparative worth to potential lives. At the time you make the decision both lives (with spinal deformity and without) are merely potentials, and your decisions change their relative likelihood of being realised. People act on this because they think the life without the deformity is better than the life with.
Yes, choosing to avoid spinal deformity involves a value judgment. But there's a difference between reducing the risk of profound suffering and optimizing for predicted traits like IQ or BMI. One stems from a widely shared ethic of care; the other starts to encode comparative desirability into existence itself.
That’s what I mean by "loaded": some judgments operate within a shared moral horizon. Others begin to redraw the boundaries of which potential lives are seen as worth bringing into the world.
Scott, the problem is lower intelligence is not a disease.
I don’t think the argument is that the lives of children with spinal deformities are worth less than other children. I think it’s that it would be preferable to live in a world where children with spinal deformities can receive appropriate treatment and accommodation, as opposed to a world where those children simply do not exist.
This tech proposes to “solve” a “problem” by engineering a situation where the “problem” doesn’t exist. That’s fine for some things, but I don’t think it’s crazy to get uneasy when the “things” in question are people.
What’s weird is that this tech simply lets parents choose one randomly generated embryo over another. If we assume there’s no a priori reason to choose one over the other, it doesn’t seem crazy to let the parents’ preferences break the tie. And right now, these preferences are things like “maximize the chance of a pregnancy that’s successful and safe for the mom” and “minimize the expected health care costs over a lifetime”. Not unreasonable!
I do think parents could be a little more honest with themselves about how much these choices are being made for their own sake, rather than their prospective child’s. It’s fine not to want to go through the gauntlet of raising a kid with a rare genetic disorder: I image it’s a huge emotional and financial weight. But probably don’t say the choice is for the child’s sake, because it’s not hard to see how that could shade into saying it’s best for such children not to exist at all.
In my opinion everything gets way more fraught if you start designing embryos from scratch. That’s not what this tech does, so I’m mostly agnostic about it. But I do get worried about slippery slopes, because humans haven’t had the greatest track record in this domain.
>I think it’s that it would be preferable to live in a world where children with spinal deformities can receive appropriate treatment and accommodation, as opposed to a world where those children simply do not exist.
FWIW, I have the opposite preference. Treatment and accommodation have their limits.
Indeed, there is a spectrum of conditions along which I think reasonable people can have differing preferences. A spinal deformity is perhaps not the most interesting example for considering the ethical consequences of this tech, due to the nature of the associated treatments/accommodations. But what about deafness? Or ADHD? Or left-handedness?
(To be clear, I’m not trying to play “gotcha” here, I’m just trying my best to pinpoint the crux of the disagreement on this topic.)
Many Thanks!
( FWIW, I, personally, happen to be childfree and long past my potential reproductive years, so I don't actually have a dog in this fight... )
I think the best public policy course of action is to leave these decisions up to the prospective parents. As you said
>Indeed, there is a spectrum of conditions along which I think reasonable people can have differing preferences.
Hopefully, the parents have their child's best interests at heart, and will weigh all the possible factors, from catastrophic ones like severe spina bifida to near-neutral ones like left-handedness, in that light. If they _don't_ , the child is screwed anyway, and there is very little that the State can do to remedy the situation. ( Yeah, child protection services exists - and regularly screws up in both directions. )
P.S. I’m trying to square how the basic refusal to tie a person’s worth to forecasted ability, as you argued in The Parable of Talents, can sit alongside the idea of selecting embryos for predicted performance. Do you still believe what you wrote in 2015, and if you do, how are you thinking about that in light of your more recent posts on embryo screening? The tones just feel really different.
The point of Parable of Talents wasn't "there is no sense in which being talented is better than being untalented". It's that can still be happy / proud of yourself / etc regardless of your level of talent.
By analogy, consider money. It's totally consistent to assert both:
-- Money isn't everything, poor people can still be happy and proud of their accomplishments, you don't have to feel bad for not being a billionaire.
-- It's good to have good economic policy so that fewer people are poor.
I reread Parable yesterday. It wasn’t just about self-worth in the face of uneven talent; it also made the case that being differently talented, or even not especially talented at all, can still have value. You leaned on comparative advantage. You even imagined having an IQ of 70 and still finding a way to contribute. But that only works if there’s real diversity of traits in the world.
This new technology seems to cut against that. If we start selecting for the same narrow set of traits -- IQ, low neuroticism, conscientiousness --- we’re shrinking the range of who gets born.
Comparative advantage breaks down. And so does the moral logic of Parable, doesn’t it?
Comparative advantage isn't about diversity of traits. Even if someone is better than I am in every way, I can still have a comparative advantage relative to them, as long as there are at least two traits.
For example, if I am mediocre at math and writing, and you are mediocre at math but good at writing, then my comparative advantage over you is in math, even though I am no better at math than you are.
Even if I am mediocre at math and writing, and you are good at math and great at writing, I still have a comparative advantage over you in math (even though you have an absolute advantage over me).
Appreciate the response.
Fair, comparative advantage doesn’t require diversity of absolute abilities. But I wasn’t really making a Ricardian point. I meant something broader.
If cultural and technological pressure pushes us to select for the same tight cluster of traits -- IQ, low neuroticism, etc. -- we narrow the range of human temperament and aptitude we’re willing to bring into the world. That might preserve comparative advantage in the technical sense, but we lose the kind of asymmetry that makes space for different kinds of lives to feel meaningful.
So even if the math holds, I’m not sure the moral or psychological ecology does.
Doesn't that logic fall apart when you start getting into more extreme cases? Your average human is simply more capable in every single way than, say, a chimpanzee. I'm pretty sure the human could even win in a fight if they trained hard enough. So what "comparative advantage" does the chimpanzee have? They are simply objectively worse in every way.
Don't beat around the bush here. You are inherently making value judgements by promoting the elimination of specific traits and the enhancements of others. That doesn't need to be a bad thing, mind you. Ask yourself: why do you want your child to have these specific traits in the first place?
"And you know once that logic takes hold, it won’t stay confined to embryos."
Why should it? It's factually correct. This is the logic used by the economic system which has produced prosperity unimaginable for the vast majority of human history.
Market logic has produced staggering material gains. It’s also optimized away biodiversity, cultural memory, and non-commercial forms of meaning. Useful doesn’t mean neutral. When that same logic starts governing which kinds of people get to exist, we’re not just scaling efficiency; we’re rewriting the criteria for entrance into life.
If you think the logic that brought you cheaper iPhones should also dictate the selection of human souls, that’s…a position. But let’s not pretend nothing changed.
In any case, the point wasn’t that the logic is flawed. The point was: once it’s normalized at the level of reproduction, it will reshape what we mean by a “worthwhile” human being.
Perhaps we ought to mull that over.
>it will reshape what we mean by a “worthwhile” human being
Sure, like it has been continuously happening for centuries.
>Perhaps we ought to mull that over.
OK, what is your positive vision for the future (which presumably excludes this particular development)?
True, what counts as a “worthwhile” human has always been contested and evolving, which is precisely why we should be alert when a new mechanism emerges that may lock in a narrower definition under the banner of optimization.
As for a “positive vision”: I don’t want to halt innovation, and I’m not against reducing suffering or helping parents make informed decisions. But we need to preserve a moral space where unpredictable, unoptimized, even “low-probability” human lives are seen as fully valid -- not just tolerated, but valued. In other words: a future where technology supports life, rather than presorts it.
That will require drawing some philosophical lines before the dashboards fill in automatically.
>which is precisely why we should be alert when a new mechanism emerges that may lock in a narrower definition under the banner of optimization
Well, there are few stronger taboos in the modern world than against "eugenics", so I very much doubt that if this manages to squeak through it would be through lack of alertness.
>That will require drawing some philosophical lines before the dashboards fill in automatically.
Philosophy's track record doesn't inspire much confidence in any lines it would produce, but of course that has never stopped philosophers.
The taboo against “eugenics” exists -- mostly in name. What we’re watching now is its rebranding as choice, optimization, and personal empowerment. Norms don’t tend to collapse through brute force, but through a gradual shift in what feels reasonable.
If your view is that ethics can’t help and vigilance doesn’t matter, then there’s nothing to discuss. That’s a shrug, not a position.
I expect to see capitalism apologia on here as a matter of course, but sweet Jesus do some of you lay it on thick.
Do you disagree with the factual claim that capitalism produced some unprecedented prosperity (while e.g. the glorious Soviet Union had a problem to feed its citizens), or do you just think it is too gauche to say it in public?
I disagree with the laughably simplistic idea that prosperity can be attributed directly to the economic system it happens under and that the only thing going on during the cold war was capitalism vs communism being weighed objectively for effectiveness, yes.
What is your explanation for why the communist paradise of Soviet Union couldn't feed its own citizens?
I mean you already can make a decision about the characteristics of your baby that goes much further than polygenic selection: By selecting your partner out of 50% of the world's population. By choosing to have a child with one person, you deny existence to all the babies that could have been born had you chosen someone else. Of course partner choice is probably rarely made just based on gene-based traits one wants to have in one's offspring, but it certainly plays a role.
However I can see where you're coming from. One parallel might be pets, e.g. dogs: Anyone can, and most do, choose a dog breed they like from a wide range available. And I guess dog owners are really happy with that and love their dog and want it to be happy and healthy, nothing wrong with that. However, the problems start when dog owners have such a strong preference in characterisics that they choose breeds that have well known health problems, like french bulldogs or whatever. There the characteristics that the owners like trump the health concerns of the dog.
What if deaf parents lived happily in a deaf community, and select the one embryo out of five that is also deaf, so their child can experience life as they do? Would that be morally right, as most people would percieve deafness as a severe disadvantage in life? Or if the parents really, really want a blue-eyed baby, and choose that one blue-eyed embryo despite a 50% chance of cancer? Also looking at the parents that send their kids to those extreme child beauty pageants, strong guardrails will probably be have to be implemented should this tech get any further, to prevent a lot of suffering in those edge cases.
Your buffet of analogies sidesteps the categorical difference between influencing an existing person’s life and choosing which possible person gets to exist based on ranked traits.
Yes, selection happens at every level of reproduction, partner choice included. But polygenic selection crosses a new threshold by ranking potential humans by algorithmic desirability before they’ve been allowed to exist.
This has now become an existential decision based on probabilistic predictions of cognitive, behavioral, and physical profiles. Let’s at least call it what it is, rather than normalizing it through analogies that don’t fit. We're not choosing a dog breed.
> But polygenic selection crosses a new threshold by ranking potential humans by algorithmic desirability before they’ve been allowed to exist.
Do you mean polygenic selection would lead to the single alogrithm that gets applied to all humans, and only those with the maximum number of points would be allowed to exist? It's the parents who make the choice, and they do so based on their own personality and preferences. They get presented with a table of x embryos vs y probabilities of characteristics from disease to IQ, and make a choice based on their perferences. I'd say it's very much like selecting a dog breed.
The parents make the choice, but the fact that it's individual choice doesn’t negate the nature of the decision being made.
We're no longer just nurturing a child or even choosing to conceive at a particular time. We're comparing multiple potential humans based on statistical forecasts and deciding which one gets to exist -- not based on catastrophic disease, but on probabilistic desirability across a range of traits. That’s fundamentally new.
It may feel like choosing a dog breed, but dogs aren’t people. They’re not moral agents. They’re not asked to find meaning in lives they were selected into based on marginally higher predicted IQ or lower BMI.
So no, I don’t think “it's just like picking a dog breed” holds up once you follow the implications through. It’s a flattening analogy that deflects from the deeper shift underway: from accepting the unpredictability of human life to curating it in advance based on optimized projections.
This redefines what it means to begin life.
What about deaf parents who refuse the MMR vaccine for their child, hoping that Rubella renders them deaf?
That’s a category error dressed as a gotcha. Pass.
Did I misunderstand your objection? Vaccination is a decision which influences an existing child.
Personally I think it's morally objectionable to deny a child vaccination because the possible outcome is one which I would call worse, even though the parents would call it better. My understanding is that in your framework, that would be okay (I'm pretty sure I disagree with that, but maybe you have a point I haven't considered).
But I certainly don't share this intuition that excluding one embryo amongst 10 is any worse of an intervention than vaccination.
I guess I can understand the reservations around genetic diversity, and I can understand the reservations for folks who believe that life begins at conception, but your reservation seems to be based on personal outrage, and I'm not sure where it's coming from.
Appreciate the clarifying effort. But no, I’m not defending MMR refusal. I flagged your example as a category error because it conflates influencing an existing child’s health (via action or omission) with choosing which potential child gets to exist in the first place.
My concern isn’t rooted in “life begins at conception” theology, or in squeamishness about medical influence. It’s in the shift from nurturing unpredictable lives to selecting among predicted ones based on ranked desirability.
Vaccination aims to protect a child already in the world. Polygenic selection, at scale, begins to define what kinds of humans are worth bringing into it. That may not feel morally weightier to you, but to me it marks a foundational change in how we relate to human life: not just caring for it, but pre-sorting it.
Except that "ranking potential humans by algorithmic desirability before they’ve been allowed to exist," does not meaningfully differ from "partner choice based on gene-based traits one wants to have in one's offspring." They're different phrases that mean the same thing: deciding beforehand what kind of children you want.
We are, in fact, choosing our 'breed' of offspring every time we decide to have children with one person and not another. We don't always know what that strain will produce, but we definitely make inferences on the basis of pre-existing traits.
The reason we currently accept the unpredictability of human life is because we cannot predict it, not because it should be fundamentally unpredictable in order to remain human. However objectionable you may find the mechanism, a change in kind has not taken place - only one of degree.
A more pertinent question would be whether we have the right to deny people the foreknowledge of genetic information, if it could be used to improve their children's lives. I don't think we do, but I'd be interested to hear your take.
Choosing a partner reflects implicit preferences, including genetic ones, but that’s not the same as explicitly ranking embryos by predicted traits and selecting accordingly. One is inference under uncertainty, the other is filtration by forecast. That’s not just a shift in degree. It’s a shift in kind.
I don’t object to foreknowledge, but to what happens when it’s used to filter human lives before they begin. The right to know doesn’t automatically imply the right to act on that knowledge in ways that redefine who gets to exist.
But people absolutely DO rank their partners on the basis of genetically-transmitted traits, with predictable outcomes for children. Tall, smart, blue eyes, etc. A shift from uncertain conditions to more certain ones is not a shift in kind, because in either case we try to make the same selections in advance.
We act on limited knowledge to redefine who gets to exist every day. The alternative is refusing screening for horrible congenital diseases because we believe that a random affliction is more moral than a conscious prevention, or actively acting against our own trait preferences for sexual partners. That's not a reality I'm eager to indulge.
When you fall in love, or even just choose a partner, you’re not running a regression on their genome. You’re drawn to a person, a whole person, whose traits emerge through culture, chance, hardship, and a lifetime of adaptation. If you hope your future child inherits their curiosity, resilience, or kindness, that’s not “ranking potential humans.” That’s loving someone and hoping what you love continues.
Embryo screening is something else entirely. It takes a cluster of possible humans and scores them on a grid of forecasted traits—IQ, BMI, mental health risk, even “educational attainment” -- and selects accordingly. That’s not preference under uncertainty. That’s predictive exclusion.
Let’s call it what it is: a shift from attraction to optimization, from courtship to computation. It doesn’t just fine-tune a familiar process; it industrializes the logic of better and worse humans.
And yes, it will change us. The tools we use to make people will reshape what we expect from them and what we think counts as a “good” life. If you think that’s just a difference in degree, I don’t think you’ve really looked.
This reads as pure nonsense to me even as someone who has misgivings about this. If you jerk off one additional time before impregnating your wife you're choosing not to let certain "potential humans" be born based on no useful criteria at all. There cannot be value to "potential humans" without ending up with completely ridiculous moral conclusions. Humans who never got past being a clump of cells are not and never were people, and have no moral value.
Libertarian eugenics can create serious issues just like authoritarian eugenics is almost certain to, but the issues arise from increased inequality and unforeseen consequences from removing certain parts of genetic diversity.
Not exactly opening with Socratic grace, are we?
The point isn’t that every potential human has moral status. It’s that the criteria we use to decide which potential humans become actual ones reflect and gradually reshape our values.
Jerking off doesn’t involve a value-laden decision between ranked embryos scored on predicted IQ, BMI, or psychiatric risk. Polygenic selection does. The novelty isn’t selection per se -- it’s the filtration of future lives through actuarial models of desirability.
You don’t need to believe embryos have full moral status to see that shifting our selection logic from randomness or love to statistical optimization exerts long-term pressure on social norms, parental expectations, and even our idea of what counts as a full human life. The stakes aren’t just biological. They’re civilizational.
I think I might have been misled by your framing. Even in this post, talking about it in terms of "potential humans" and "future lives" makes it sound like you're advocating on behalf of imaginary people rather than focusing on the potential negative social impacts (on real people) of a society that is willing to engage in eugenics, which seems to be your actual point.
Yeah, I'm not concerned that certain hypothetical people won’t exist but that we’re beginning to encode narrow, quantifiable definitions of value into the act of creation itself. And to normalize that encoding as rational, desirable, even virtuous.
“I’ve decided to use this technology” Bros gonna reroll his children 😭🙏
Typo: "well, there’s still an outside change that" - probably meant chance?
I think I agree that the immediate first-order benefits of IVF embryo selection (and by extension the type of more targeted gene editing discussed in the linked post by Gene Smith) are likely to be extremely positive, considering how much low-hanging fruit there is, even if considering only the disease risk reduction.
Still, I find myself more concerned about the long-term consequences. Gene's post on LW makes an analogy to the development of the modern broiler chicken, which seems to me more alarming than he lets on. Inevitably, if these techniques develop as Scott projects, it will lead to a narrowing of the human gene pool over time (though probably not to a single point, as I imagine there would be some clusters of coordinated traits that are favorable among different values systems).
Slightly closer to home, I look at my purebred yellow Labradors. Fantastic companion animals, and certainly not the least practical breed out there. But I cannot imagine a population of labs surviving in the wild under more adverse conditions. How many generations of hardcore gene selection does it take until we're the same? How robust is that population (to X-risks) compared to the current, naturally-selected order?
Reading some of those objections I'm reminded of that old tagline from Gattaca "There is no gene for the human spirit." A sentiment to which we can now reply "No, but there's probably about 10 thousand SNPs correlated with it."
I've never really understood the objection that with the development of AI there's no point in trying to improve human abilities. Setting aside the fact that I'm very much not convinced that AI is just around the corner, even if it is I still see the value in humans. A diversity of minds has the same benefits as a diverse ecosystem, each organisms filling and exploiting its niche. It would be incredibly short-sighted of us to neglect the development of different mindtypes.
While there's lots to get to, I'm disappointed you didn't even brush up against my main ethical concern about this technology, which is diversity. No, not the race thing -- I mean real diversity. I like living in a world full of vastly different people, with different body types, different tempers and intellects, different tastes in ice cream. A democratization of designer-babies would bring with it a homogenization of the human race towards a consensus 'optimal' form, and that just creeps me the hell out, like a lower-rate version of tiling the universe with paperclips. The natural endpoint of this technology seems to be a world populated entirely with tall, mathy, conventionally handsome, allistic, sociable people. Depending on the way society's blowing they'll either all be heterosexual, or all bisexual. By god, what a waste of a planet.
When I imagine a glorious transhumanist deep utopia, it looks more like Wonderland than Heaven; it's a world like the Culture; it's a world of endless variety, where hardly any two humans have the same skin color and the person next to you on the bus might not even have the same package of *senses*. Granted, modulo AGI which gives adult humans the ability to shapeshift, this sort of technology would be necessary to get something like that. But I don't think the humanity of 2025 can be trusted with it yet. If this goes big before something else changes the course of destiny, I think it's all too likely we'll erase all the interesting but unconventional or stigmatised variations, the left-handedness and the autism and the obligate monosexuality and the unibrows, from the genome long before we grow wise and realise how stultifyingly *boring* it's all become now that everyone is a sporty Von Neumann.
And there's another, related fear. I don't want to go extinct. Maybe *you* want your kids to be smarter than you, but I don't, particularly. There are simple pleasures I wish I could enjoy that bore me to death, because my mind won't sit still; jokes I don't laugh at because I can see the punchline coming a mile away. And sure, I don't know the thrill of winning a high-level chess game against a grandmaster; but that's just it. It's all a treadmill. I don't want our supergenius children to find all our jokes boring, our music simplistic and our novels obvious. I want children to whom we can pass our culture on into eternity; children we can laugh with. Not children to whom everything that defines who we are will look like Dora the Explorer. I think it would do them, and us, a great disservice.
> I like living in a world full of vastly different people, with different body types, different tempers and intellects, different tastes in ice cream. A democratization of designer-babies would bring with it a homogenization of the human race towards a consensus 'optimal' form, and that just creeps me the hell out, like a lower-rate version of tiling the universe with paperclips.
Thank you! I completely agree. There are many traits that probably aren’t “optimal” for maximizing socio-economic status or whatever, but society needs some % of them to thrive long-term. Tortured poets, revolutionaries, etc. Anything that reduces genetic diversity risks “optimizing” these people away. (I’m a diagnosed autist, and I don’t want to “optimize” *me* away!)
How do these concerns not apply equally to giving babies prenatal vitamins?
You're going from a more diverse state (some babies born with deformities from lack of vitamins, some healthy) to a less diverse state (all babies born healthy). And if you have a minor vitamin deficiency, then moving all kids to the no-minor-vitamin-deficiency state is driving "your type" extinct.
I think I just decide that diversity in whether people have deformities and diseases isn't the kind of diversity I care about. I care about the kind of diversity where some people are Einstein and some are Taylor Swift and some are MLK. But all of those are healthy, high-IQ people who didn't die of spina bifida at age 4.
And how, exactly, do you intend to have a glorious transhumanist future where everyone is a different type without any genetic technologies? I'm actually more concerned about this than excited - I worry at some point they'll come up with a predictor for extraversion, and half of parents will select in favor and half against, and then things will get pretty weird.
My main answer is that this technology at its current level of efficacy/cost isn't enough to cause broad social changes. And if you extend it outward until it is, we're already in the glorious transhumanist future (or at most one generation away from it, after the hyperselected people grow up and invent transhuman technologies) and we'll pass off the problem to them.
I still think the equation of raising IQ with curing obvious awful diseases is fallacious. It's not obvious to me that, past a certain threshold enabling e.g. literacy, smarter people's lives are better or more worth living; you're just moving the hedonistic treadmill around, while reducing the variety of minds that exist.
I also want to stress that my two points are separate, even if they come from similar places, and that my concern about "my type going extinct" was specifically cerebral (i.e. "I want there to always be people who think sufficiently like me to appreciate the same kind of art I liked and created"), as distinct from my worry about from the overall loss of variety incurred by erasing pattern baldness or whatever.
Relatedly, you seem to have side-stepped the risk of traits which are not objectively harmful, but are socially stigmatized, being selected against. It's one thing to be maximally spicy and say "we shouldn't select dwarfism and deafness out of existence", but my worries apply even without that sort of thing. e.g. unibrows, (non-debilitating) autism, etc. There are plenty of idiosyncrasies that are not deformities or disabilities, but which parents, for various, shallow reasons, might disproportionately choose against passing on.
> And how, exactly, do you intend to have a glorious transhumanist future where everyone is a different type without any genetic technologies?
I did raise that very point in the first post. You're right, of course. It's just that, like that *other* technology that could bring about a glorious transhumanist future, it could ruin the world as much as it could save it, and I'm not sure current humans are wise enough to use it well yet. If embryo selection remains the *only* transhuman tech for the foreseeable future, I don't think "well, that'll be our transhuman children's problem, they've got this" is a get-out-of-jail-free card. I wouldn't particularly expect the hyperselected transhumans to be wiser just because they're smarter in terms of raw IQ. Potentially they just get stuck in a bootstrap loop where the kind of types that are selected for feel increasingly icky about people who display non-selected traits, and have progressively more homogenized children until the idiosyncratic genes are lost - with the unselected humans who felt the skin-crawling horror I feel now dying of old age before they can grind the process to a halt.
Obviously the "we'll hit AGI first" argument defeats this concern, but then, as you said, it kinda defeats all concerns. I think conversations like this one are best carried out with the understanding that we're talking about the "for some reason AGI takes another hundred years/isn't possible/etc." scenario, not one where extending this particular technology to infinity has to also interact with other technological breakthroughs that would happen in the meantime.
>I think conversations like this one are best carried out with the understanding that we're talking about the "for some reason AGI takes another hundred years/isn't possible/etc." scenario, not one where extending this particular technology to infinity has to also interact with other technological breakthroughs that would happen in the meantime.
Agreed. AGI (or at least ASI, if possible) overwhelms virtually all other concerns.
If embryo selection (and, possibly, genetic engineering of some sort) becomes pervasive, for generations, I share your concern about diversity being selected out.
I agree with Scott's
>I care about the kind of diversity where some people are Einstein and some are Taylor Swift and some are MLK. But all of those are healthy, high-IQ people who didn't die of spina bifida at age 4.
I expect that the long run effect of parental genetic selection wouldn't preserve that degree of diversity. I'd expect that, e.g. we would get _good_ predictors of the big 5 personality traits. And there would be a point in that 5-D space which predicts good life outcomes. And the large majority of parents would choose genes which predict close to that outcome. And the distribution of traits would narrow in the direction of a delta function at that point.
My main reason for not being concerned about this is (a) it will take multiple generations, perhaps even centuries (b) yeah, I really _do_ expect AGI to happen first, maybe 2-10 years, barring an antarctic level AI winter.
EDIT: Re personality traits, currently the effective dimensionality of the 5-D space, while not quite the full 5-D, is a bit over 4 (from ChatGPT, Claude agrees)
https://chatgpt.com/share/688dc25b-6940-8006-8483-bef9271cb775
Even if pressure towards the optimal choice doesn't push it to a 0-D point (there are a range of socioeconomic niches...), I would be surprised if it doesn't at least collapse to a lower-dimensional attractor.
Your mistake here lies in predicting that choice in heritability leads to sameness. The genetic variance of a given population will not necessarily decrease with a loss of deleterious mutations, and traits that influence genetic variety are found within particular groups, so there's no worry about the loss of unibrows any time soon.
Additionally, you seem to be assuming that every trait will be optimized and selected for, even though we don't find this in practice. Genetic variation is hugely influenced by selective choice, and there is some evidence to suggest that this is genetically-determined and therefore resilient. The fact that you or I might want a tall, mathy, conventionally handsome, bisexual god for a partner doesn't mean that someone else might not have a strong preference for a medium-height, artistic, conventionally handsome (this probably won't change), heterosexual. So long as choice remains free, beneficial variation will persist.
Hi Scott, thanks for the thoughtful post. I was surprised to find myself very convinced, but then reflecting more on my un-ease, I think there is an ethical dilemma that haunts me, and I was curious your thoughts.
I'll assume that in a couple decades we'll have much stronger predictive power than today on a wider range of traits, in order to dispel objections around the efficacy or current menu of options.
Ethical Objection: Arms Race
Diving into "Ethical Objection: Cost," an underlying assumption seems to be that people's nominal choice is indeed a true and freely made choice. If we give people the means to choose, then they can choose freely whether or not to choose IQ of their embryo. But, given how competition is fundamental to human life, if your child's peers are getting ahead with genetic enhancements, then do you really have a choice? This looks a lot to me like an unavoidabe start of an arms race? Those who choose not to participate will be dooming their progeny to failure competing in society. To exacerbate the issue, I would imagine that the positive traits can compound, generation over generation.
I am sold that the category of traits control mere preferences (say, eye color) seem harmless, and traits that fight disease are good. Consider the category of "enhancements" that will make your child more competitive in society (whatever societal context you participate in). Does this lead to an arms race? If so, is that a good/bad/neutral thing?
If productivity increases enough, for this or other reasons, we'll be able to afford UBI for all anyway, and so the need to compete is reduced.
Keynes thought that we'd develop so much productivity his grandchildren would work 15 hours a day: https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/2712/Revisiting-KeynesEconomic-Possibilities-for-Our
Karl Marx argues that the surplus labor should be socialized back to leisure. This did not come to be, and China is one of the most competitive societies in the world now.
Deep thinkers from every end of the spectrum of economic theory have predicted that we'll have reduced competition, and more leisure for generations.
I'm starting to think it ain't gonna happen.
Evolutionary biology seems to have woven the need to compete and progress and race into our fibers.
By most accounts, hunter-gatherer societies had a lot of leisure time. We already are plenty productive, that's not what's stopping us from achieving this!
You could imagine some government presiding over a single country and limiting leisure, but as long as some people want a leg-up, or to get ahead, or to push their social status, or to indulge their ego, there will be competition, domestically. Internationally gets even crazier -- Without a credible threat of force from a governing body, no society would feel comfortable "being lazy" while another potentially maniacal society (bloodthirsty dictator, democracy with ethnonationalist ambitions, etc) can out-compete and threaten you.
On a related note, collectivist societies are more competitive rather than less https://x.com/robinhanson/status/1949283054058443218
In a collectivist society, everything is decided by the will of the people!
But if you have a lot of social capital, it turns out that the will of the people just happens to be aligned with your personal wishes...
> If this were a single-use medical treatment, delivered by a doctor after someone got the relevant condition, it would be one of the biggest advances of the decade - imagine a drug that cures 10 - 40% of breast cancers with no side effects! But in fact, it works for breast cancer, and schizophrenia, and heart attacks, and approximately everything else. The only things comparable are antibiotics and GLP-1RAs.
Vaccines too, aren't they?
Also, not to minimize the benefit of embryo selection if it works, but one difference from a drug that cures 10 - 40% of breast cancers (and other diseases...) is that it's like a drug that has to be given to the entire population, including those who don't have an won't go on to have breast cancer, in order to cure 10–40% of those who do get it, so this increases the cost (and, if you wouldn't otherwise use IVF, discomfort) per case cured — kind of like vaccines. Actually this may also be a reason there's more controversy around vaccines than other drugs: they are given to healthy people, whom it's not yet known if the vaccine will benefit, so people tolerate less risk of side-effects than someone who already has a disease and wants to get rid of it.
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((EDIT: already mentioned by other commenters:) One thing I didn't see mentioned: last time I've read about it, IVF itself had some moderate risks to the embryo; what's the situation with that now, and how does it compare to the benefits of embryo selection? This is relevant to those who consider IVF only in order to do embryo selection.)
Another minor point: Do the companies pay attention to avoiding inadvertent sex selection? If, say, breast cancer is more common than prostate cancer, or if they are worse at selecting against it, that could accidentally lead to the embryo with the lowest risk of the diseases they select against disproportionately being male. Widespread sex selection could cause problems (some people of the more common sex won't find a partner); here in the West I don't think most people have a strong sex preference about their children, but if we don't consider and avoid it, embryo selection could accidentally lead to sex selection even if nobody wants it.
> It depends on the number of embryos they have to work with; the more embryos, the better you can do by selecting the best.
You can do even better by selecting gametes from individuals who have the traits desired. If if you want to have a kid who is good at tennis then get sperm and egg donations from professional tennis players.
In general, reading a phenotypic effect off an actual phenotype is always going to be easier and more accurate than trying to do it from genes.
I'm sure some people will say "but I want my children to pass on my genes"; and fine, those people who want that can do it. But the government should also facilitate prospective parents who want make use of the best genomes out there.
> It’s probably even obvious for governments to pay for all citizens to get these, given how much they’d save on health care costs.
IMO it's a no-brainer for governments to do this, and offer genetic counselling including sperm/egg donation, for those people who want that. Governments would not only save on health care costs, they'd also benefit from a more intelligent and conscientious population with people less likely to commit crimes.
Yes, this technology is most helpful for people who want to have biological children with their life partner, and/or can't get the greatest genius in the world to donate a gamete to them. But I think that's 99% of people.
> and/or can't get the greatest genius in the world to donate a gamete to them
I envisage government-run gamete donor banks where donors are selected for things like: high IQ, high conscientiousness, high achievement, in good general health, not having committed serious crimes, being physically attractive, etc.
Because it's a lot easier to get sperm out of a man than eggs out of a woman, that would probably be what was mostly done.
> But I think that's 99% of people.
I agree with you that it's most people, but I would guess it's more like 70-80% than 99%. My reasons for this are:
(1) If I ever had kids I would want to go this route, as I have been held back all my life by poor mental health, and I wouldn't want the same to happen to my children.
(2) Most parents want their kids to have happy successful lives and if this helps, many would go for it.
(3) Never in my life has any parent bragged to me about how ugly or stupid their child is, but many times have they done the opposite.
(4) As well as optimising for being clever, this process can also optimise for children who're good looking or have pleasant personalities. I feel this last one might be important to many parents considering they will be in close proximity to their kid for the next 18 or so years.
(5) Adoption is a thing in many cultures. In some cultures you could even adopt people after you were dead!
Obviously if 20-30% of kids were created by this route and so had high genetic quality, that would improve things in any country.
This is fascinating and IN PRINCIPLE sounds like great things happening fast, but I have an incredibly strong feeling that the whole text seems to devote much more attention to comparatively lesser concerns ("we don't have this as good for non white people yet", "what if I still get x cancer even if I had a 5 vs 10% chance) and only fairly briefly cover the huge, glaring, elephant in the room: implementing this on anything even remotely societal scale (even within the top 25%) would completely, possibly irrevocably change how one of the key human life-form / species - relevant functions is carried out. That this is "IVF only" option seems to be huge. Unless you have a massive genetic burden (and even then testing and aborting if detected seems better), this seems a real hurdle?
On the other hand, expanding to individual pregnancies would massively up abortion rate in women "trying for optimal" or at least "trying for good enough", which would create its own issues (and a big outcry in groups already opposed to abortion or on the fence regarding it).
> Selecting the best of five or ten embryos is not a very effective way to get the genes you want
I appreciate that Scott mentions this primarily because it is quite common in popular culture to go around claiming that PGS embryo screening will give people “superbabies” and this claim is obviously a marketing gimmick.
The within-family validation that Herasight has done is great and shows that their screening can help parents increase the chance that their kids will lead healthier lives. I think that’s great! But we shouldn’t oversell the technology because that just breeds mistrust and resentment.
If you've already decided to do IVF, I think the rest is footnotes. One has to manually select somehow in any case. (I disregard scare talk using thought-stop words like "eugenics." If someone has a particular objection, I'm happy to consider it.)
For my part, I strongly favor making babies the natural way.
Arguments about the genetic components of heritability (or lack thereof) often seem sort of unresolvable with existing techniques since there is no independent variable to manipulate when you're dealing with humans. e.g. If you hypothesize an allele causes black fur on an animal, you can manipulate it (by breeding or CRISPRing) & see if you're right : a proper attempt at falsification. In humans, there's no manipulation so you have to all kinds of correlative stuff, which kind of can't make causal inference. (Theoretical considerations aside, not being able to directly test stuff seems to make progress way, way slower.)
I have my reservations about current PRS, but I am hopeful the application of these sorts of technologies could produce exactly the sort of data that could resolve some of these arguments & increase predictive power: by actually *testing* trait predictions, not on a held-out set (which could have the same confounders as the training data) but with a real experiment (selecting or CRISPRing an embryo). The resulting data could have long-term benefits. Even in the unrealistic extreme case where everything is population stratification and selection on PRS didn't work at all, that would suck for the people who paid for the service but would be a very valuable result scientifically & medically.
(Of course this assumes that there is enough high quality follow-up work measuring the traits people selected in this way, and enough transparency on the part of the firms offering this service about their predictive algorithms. Also practical considerations mean that this won't exactly be a controlled trial & there will probably be dramatic selection effects based on the sort of people who pay for it. But still better than just running regressions on biobank data.)
Modifying genes was impossible for most time and still very restricted, but many people tried creating environments to create geniuses and barely found anything; most educational interventions produce IQ gains in children that fade in adulthood.
"Confounders" here are not environment variables (like nitrogen in soil for plants); if anti-hereditarians determine that a trait is "confounded" they don't learn how to modify environment to change a trait, but they actually find that people like to self-segregate and the rich will pay money so their child wouldn't attend same school as children of poor. In some sense, when people can migrate where they want, unlike North Korea, is very good!
Some of "confounding" might be womb environment rather than "school quality", did they test that?
But hey, we could just clone a few geniuses instead of trying to analyze what of 6 billion bp makes them, and who is against that the most?
All the companies you've mentioned are going off of public bio-bank data from what I can tell. Is there a reason they haven't tried to prove out their technology by raising some genetically predicted super mice, and provide empirical evidence (through enough overly healthy and smart mice) that this technology works?
I absolutely approve of reducing the risk of disease. It also seems profoundly stupid to spend lots of money on determining hair color when hair dye is a thing. Most people don't even know Christina Hendricks isn't a natural redhead.
>Mark my words, one day there will be entire subfields of therapy dedicated to these issues.
I feel like this is the core of the issue, really. When people say "I am more than my genes," they're probably not saying "I deny that statistical correlations between genes and outcomes exist," they're saying "I do not want my kids to grow up being told they're Genetically Superior/Inferior." Which is a correct thing to say!
You can get superbabies *without* telling them that they are genetically superior.
Then you can attribute all their success to their hard work. Growth mindset!
They're going to realize eventually. Obviously they're going to figure out why their parents (and everyone else) is paying absurd amounts of cash on these interventions. It's not just because they feel like it, it's because the products of such interventions are simply better. People are going to realize that it all boils down to genes. The societal consequences that will be interesting to see for sure, and I'm surprised Scott didn't mention that. Some lies serve a purpose.
> Somebody in Macaronesia in 3525 AD will avoid getting breast cancer because of you (if there is still cancer; if there are still breasts).
Big breasts are a burden (literally), genetically engineer flat-chested women and men who are not attracted to breasts.
I wanted to say that you can go even further, do parallel gender selection away from the accidents of evolutionary attraction toward more functional bodies that we would consider ugly now, but... in reality the fertility crisis will likely result in artificial wombs/vat babies/cloning much sooner than 3525, decoupling procreation from attraction and eventually making sexual attraction a weird rudiment that the enlightened aces (and eventually everyone) would sneer at.
The Selection objection I find strange. If you had been selected for pretty eyes regardless of cancer risk, you still won the billion:one lottery! The remarkable odds against any of us existing at all makes this a silly objection. If they had made a "better" choice regarding cancer, you wouldn't exist!
Doesn't this prove too much? If your parents beat you as a kid, you can't complain, at least you exist at all!
I'd complain, but they'd have to beat me pretty damn hard to make me wish I had never existed
Yes, and I think people will also complain about their parents selecting them for eyes rather than cancer risk (while still not wishing they didn't exist).
I agree there's a philosophical sense where if their parents had done anything differently, they wouldn't exist, but I think it's a very weak sense. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help . Or compare to the example of someone whose grandparents (before they were born) left their parents money for their college education, but their parents gambled it away and lost everything. Now, there is some sense in which if the parents hadn't gone to the casino, it would have jostled the sperm in their testicles slightly differently, and a different child would have eventually been born instead of them. But I think it would still be reasonable to resent your parents for this, even though in some weak sense it caused you to exist.
Sure, but I think there's a tangible difference in that in the selection case the parents made a conscious choice of me vs another, and presumably I know that. In the gambled away example it *feels* more random, disconnecting the choice from the existence in one's mind. Even though it could be argued that the end result is the same, complaining in the first case seems more unreasonable and less defendable.
I think the solution that puzzle is you judge people based on the EV of their decisions, not the outcomes, even if you are one of the outcomes
Don't IVF babies have modestly higher baseline rates of birth defects and other health problems?
If you already need to do IVF, sure, adding genetic selection largely makes sense. But if you don't need IVF, it would be important to consider not just the health downsides for the mother of doing IVF but also the health tradeoffs for the baby, right?
> Although GP would continue to only test for health outcomes, you could forward the raw data from GP to Nucleus, and Nucleus would predict extra traits, including height, BMI, eye color, hair color, ADHD, IQ, and even handedness.
It does seem important to ensure your kids have an even number of hands.
Nah, don't you want them to grow up to be Alexander the Great? https://people.brandeis.edu/~mob/puns.htm
"Suppose you invest the $3,250 in an index fund that makes 7% over inflation, then give it to your future child when they turn 45 (average age of type 2 diabetes diagnoses). Now it’s worth $75,000. Is this the “true” cost of the intervention?". no, $75k in 46 years is less than the true cost, which is $3250 today. it is less because $3250 can buy $75k in 46 years or it can buy other things which are likely more valuable. we know they're likely to be more valuable because people use their marginal $3250s to buy them and not $75k in 46 years
of course sometimes people do trade $3250 today for $75k in 46 years, usually when saving for retirement. so sometimes the two are the same. but your post seemed to imply that this was not the next-best use of the money
So much rigor here and then "AGI is going to cure all disease and I know that with overwhelming confidence despite the entire history of human folly regarding such predictions"
Eventually we are going to automate scientific research through artificial intelligence. Not clear when. Soon after that happens, I think it’s reasonable to assume that most diseases will be cured, just as we might assume that most diseases will be cured with enough scientific study
Well, if we're all turned into paperclips, that sure will cure all disease!
I'm less sanguine about what will happen to medicine, but I _do_ expect that, barring an antarctic level AI winter, AI will radically change the whole game.
please see previous note re: the entire history of human folly regarding such predictions
Is the set of "such predictions" constructed ex post as a list of predictions that did not turn out to be true before August 2025? Or was there a way to create this list e.g. 100 years ago, without including other foolish ideas, such as computers or airplanes?
Would you like to comment on the topic actually discussed in the above post instead of telling us how you think AGI isn't going to happen for the millionth time?
I think the main worry I have about this technology, (and about selective reproduction programs like ones attempted by Musk or things like The Repository for Germinal Choice) is some variation of "what gets measured gets managed".
That is, we are going to use this technology to optimize things that we can measure. These things that we can measure, like IQ, are imperfect heuristics for things that we actually care about (intelligence or mental capacity or academic potential I guess?). And even those are simpler than the things that we actually-actually care about which are at the level of our society and culture - overall standard of living, kindness, freedom, etc...
So if we gain the power to optimize for things, and we start optimizing for the heuristics that we have available to us, like IQ, we may face an alignment problem. Maybe the things that we can measure right now (like our current conception of IQ), or the things that are in vogue right now (height, particular shades of eye color), are misaligned with the things that we might ultimately care about.
So maybe IQ is negatively correlated with some other important set of traits that are murky and difficult to define and we can't measure very well (say, creativity or being an empathetic human being, or "research taste" or etc...). Just because these things are hard to define and difficult to measure doesn't mean they're any less important.
Furthermore, traits that may be beneficial for individuals may not be beneficial for society. So maybe an individual does better with higher IQ within our current society, but a society where a significant number of individual have a higher IQ undergoes a phase transition which is worse in some way. Maybe it's an overall higher level of cynicism, or a breakdown in the useful fictions that create some form of social cohesion and makes economic cooperation possible. Maybe it's a loss of overall diversity of the population that makes the overall population more fragile.
I guess my overall feeling on this is that we are so primitive in our understanding about these things, and our power to make changes to our genome may advance much faster than our understanding about the societal consequences of those changes. And part of me thinks "but I suppose that's just science in general", and part of me thinks "no, that's just technological determinism!".
This post made me think a lot about the silo series by Hugh Howey. Is humankind doomed because the advances in our power to change the world and ourselves outpaces the wisdom required to wield it without destroying ourselves?
This sounds like the antagonistic pleiotropy suggestion, but see my response above. In practice most good things are correlated with one another.
I am also very worried about our power to change the world outpacing our wisdom, which is why I want to intelligence-enhance children as soon as possible! I agree intelligence isn't exactly the same as wisdom, but it's probably pretty correlated. If it isn't, feel free to submit an ACX Grants proposal to develop a genetic predictor for wisdom!
the Doom of the Noldor - they were intelligent but they were not wise.
they should have engineered their children for more wisdom instead, and be more like... uhm... ents?
It seems to me the most important ethical consideration is the one you treat the most glibly, that parents will be making a specific choice about what their kids should be like, that their kids DNA will effectively become a message vector in our society. This isn't just a matter for therapy, this means inviting all the most irrational cultural pathologies into our genetic code, and basically making future generations subject to a certain biological totalitarianism by their parents. It seems to me an exceptional important ethical consideration to standardize any selection process so that it ceases to be a potential message vector.
Stuff like this: "How much would you pay to give your children an extra 1-4 years of healthy life?" and framing things in terms of how much better you're making your child's life is misleading. You're not making anyone live longer, you're bringing into being someone who lives a longer life over someone who lives a shorter life. I might pay a lot to make my actual dog live four years longer, but that reason doesn't automatically translate to a reason of the same strength to buy or breed a chihuaha rather than a great dane, even though in the same sense I am "giving my dog a longer life".
If you're a repugnant-conclusion bullet-biting totalist utilitarian then this difference doesn't matter but for most other plausible moral perspectives (especially those on which your reasons regarding your children are stronger than those regarding strangers) it does. That's not to say you don't have any reason to bring about a longer-lived child, but it's very plausibly not a reason of nearly the same strength as your reason to cure your child of a disease which would end their life early.
I've had 8 children, three miscarried.
No....just no. This is not a good path.
Why not?
It isn't going to end with just wanting to make sure your kid doesn't have diabetes. Genetic disease is the bogus gateway drug. This is a frankensteinian future with a million unintended consequences. No one is going to think about, or care about those unintended consequences until it is too late.
This isn't a spinning jenny moment. This is playing God. Historically, philosophically, morally - that never ends well.
What are the historical precedents?
Playing God has gone pretty well for us so far.
> unintended consequences
The problem with the "unintended consequences" argument is it's far too broad. When people invented agriculture, writing, metalworking, or movable type, all those had unintended consequences.
If we ban everything that might have unintended consequences, we ban all progress.
If this doesn’t seem fundamentally different to you than the spinning jenny, then I don’t know what to say.
We've been playing god since we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. That Rubicon has been well and truly crossed!
Again, if I have to explain the difference between human fetal genetic manipulation and the spinning Jenny, then it's a pointless discussion.
All evidence suggests that there either is no God, it's asleep at the wheel, or it doesn't have our wellbeing as a high priority. Thus, we might as well play God because it's us or nothing.
God is welcome to show up and do his job if God objects to someone trying to cover his shift.
Welp....we'll all find out someday.
The argument about Dude, Genetic determinism has a fine side. Basically, not that this is a reason that we should not do this. But basically, if you really think about the stength of these predictions, they are not very strong. After use for selection, there are very few situations where the information about future traits would be useful compared to not knowing (mostly test order for diagnosis). If these techniques get broader, they are still weak evidence about what someone will become. These companies do not publish the remaining variance from the expected values published (especially for IQ and healthspans), and they should. If you really internalize those, doing that behavior is obviously dumb. The variance remaining (either from what a 3 percent chance means, or the remaining lifespan variance, or the IQ variance not explained), is often high enough that bets against the low probability even need to make sense, and having strong expectations about how children will end up are in general, low to negative EV even if your are expectations are right, and even decisions based on that expectation with bad payoffs in the low probabilty case should be avoided, for obvious reasons. That is, the fact that the obvious case is so obvious is tripping up the complainers.
> It’s probably even obvious for governments to pay for all citizens to get these, given how much they’d save on health care costs.
Not a criticism of the idea, but I was under the impression that healthier citizens cost more, because they live longer - is this not true?
They also probably pay more taxes on average, which is where the government gets its money from in the first place.
I think this is not true once you take into account cohort effects. Although it might be true that the people who die earlier have fewer working years on average, most of the extra mortality is among the old who wouldn't be working anyway (and may instead depend on the public purse for pensions etc).
I don't expect the average ACX reader to be persuaded by my thoughts on the immorality of IVF in general, let alone embryo selection. Those arguments are out there if you want to look for them.
But perhaps you feel a bit of disgust at the thought of people picking out children like they'd pick out puppies from a breeder. If you can have a labradoodle, why not a blue-eyed blond baby with ten more IQ points and a 32% lower risk of cancer?
I also think this post glosses over the cost/inequality aspect of it. There are billions of people on earth who are never going to be able to afford this. Their descendants in the next few generations won't be able to, either (barring some weird post-scarcity techno-utopia AI-world, which I'm not counting on). What does the world look like in 2125 after a few generations of elites selecting embryos (with the technology presumably improving along the way) while 4 billion or so Africans can't or won't? As embryo selection gets better, people will be picking for everything you can imagine: looks, athletic ability, artistic talent, etc. You'd be on the way to having two totally different human species. Doesn't this sound like a dystopian sci-fi novel to y'all?
“Doesn't this sound like a dystopian sci-fi novel to y'all?”
Yes, but I think you’re guilty of status quo bias here. The world looks like a dystopian novel to me now. It’s not clear that your image is any worse.
What's the state of polygenetic prediction for Big 5 personality traits? Supposing you think AI will make IQ and "boring" illnesses like cancer, T2D, and heart disease irrelevant. You might reasonably conclude that you should focus your efforts on having kids who are kind, thoughtful, creative, and emotionally stable (or at least not unhinged assholes). Would love to know how many SDs you could move on various Big 5 traits as a function of number of embryos chosen from.
Has anyone written at any length about the potential for personality selection?
Seems like there are 4 big categories of traits ordered by controversy:
1. Clearly negative health based traits (genetic diseases, propensity for high cholesterol, etc)
2. Clearly positive traits, not clearly health-related (IQ, balance, etc)
3. Preference based aesthetic traits (eye color, height)
4. Personality traits (neuroticism, openness to experience, etc)
Of course, many traits will blend between multiple categories. IQ is correlated with mortality, tons of psychiatric conditions are associated with big 5, etc. By and large, though, I’d guess that there are more who would object to eye color than to IQ and more to IQ than to cancer risk.
Personality traits seem to be objectionable on entirely new criteria than the rest. It’s one thing to charitably select for lower incidence of cancer in your kids and a whole other thing to select for kids that are likely to have a charitable attitude or a certain belief structure. This seems inevitable, though. If we can select against depression we will eventually be able to select for gregariousness, for ambition, for any number of other traits. There’s the question of if this is ethical to do at all and then the secondary question of, if it is, is it ethical to select for a personality for your kids that is, for example, less likely to be happy but more likely to be successful?
"Most genetic data available for research/commercial use comes from the UK, US, and Europe - areas which are mostly white." All three had been working on this problem by making their populations less white, although the US has shifted on that in the past six months.
>the US has shifted on that in the past six months
Has it? I've seen much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but few stats.
I think people in the rationalism community should definitely not select for higher IQ fetuses, because they likely already carry risk factors for autism. In another population it'd be fine; in this one it's riskier.
Isn’t autism negatively correlated with IQ
Some guy with a similarly sounding blog wrote a whole post about this! But to sum up, *actual* autism is negatively correlated, but SNPs for IQ are positively correlated.
So if you have two parents that are on the BAP - broader autism phenotype - they already have a much higher risk for having an autistic child. If you do embryo selection on IQ you're also much more likely to select the autistic child because there's overlap between IQ SNPs and autism SNPs; some of these are the same SNPs.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
> Ethical Objection: Personhood
I'm glad you have addressed this concern, but you have not really internalized it properly.
> Ask anybody dealing with regular insulin injections (let alone limb amputations) whether it would be worth $27,000 to wave a magic wand and not have Type 2 diabetes! It’s not a hard question!
The proper question is, whether it would be worth $27,000 to wave a magic wand and be replaced by your sibling who doesn't have Type 2 diabetes. I agree this is not a hard question.
Also, while I follow and agree with all your points intellectually, I just can't share your seeming enthusiasm. "romantic and aesthetic"? Yeah, nothing says romantic like selecting an embryo based on the polygenic score calculations.
Thank you! This technology is not "curing" anything, it's just throwing people in the garbage who have undesirable genetics.
Only if you consider a zygote to be a person, which I don't.
99% of people who could theoretically exist will never exist, no matter what you do. We may as well take some responsibility instead of leaving it to chance and pretending that absolves us.
I read recently about multi-PGS where they take PGS for seemingly unrelated traits and make composite predictor (which might be non-linear) with better score. But I found very little about it.
Eugenics carries a deeply negative legacy, for reasons any student of history will understand. That said, it’s worth distinguishing modern genetic screening from its past abuses.
Preventing heritable diseases is widely considered a positive goal. Reducing the burden of serious medical conditions can improve individual lives and contribute to public health. Using technology to improve the overall condition of the human species is a valid long-term goal.
Moreover, I submit that the defining feature of our species is intelligence. In today’s society, lower cognitive functioning can be a barrier to employment and independence, while higher cognitive ability is linked to greater productivity. If reproductive technology allows parents to select for intelligence, does it really matter if they, at the same time, choose their children's eye color?
You go on to mention race. While obvious characteristics like skin color are irrelevant, science has repeatedly observed group-level differences in cognitive outcomes across populations. These differences correlate strongly with the prosperity of the respective societies. At the same time, fertility tends to decline as societies become more prosperous - something noticed even in antiquity. This is, effectively, a brake on human progress. Whether this can, in the long-term, be addressed by genetic screening?
If a company is selling a product that costs tens of thousands, but there's not really any way to verify the product worked in practice without doing a study across large numbers of the product's customers over 80 years... then I'd have a very high prior that it doesn't work as advertised. The potential for fraud or mistakes is too high.
If it doesn't work for whatever reason, by the time this can be proven to a legal standard (particularly the parts relating to the longevity of the selected children, and their disease frequency in later life), the customers and the founders will be dead, and the company may no longer exist for your grandchildren to sue.
Or, to put it another way, if I wanted an unethical way to get rich, I could sell expensive products whose efficacy couldn't be disproven until after my death.
I think this is a concern, but we already have a culturally normal practice for something similar: the construction business. We regularly contract companies to build houses and bridges and so on intended to last for 100+ years. I think many of the same ways we assess the reliability of construction can be applied to embryo selection, albeit with a lot more uncertainty at this stage.
Because the selection involves a variety of traits that become evident in different years after the purchase, we can assess how reliable the company is to some extent long before we get to the 80 years out threshold: firstly you can genotype the baby to see if the claimed genes are actually what's in the kid. Secondly, there are traits like eye color that show up within a few years, traits like height that show up within a few decades etc.
In that time, we also get more data on the genetics of cancer and other long-term risks in the population in general, and we can compare the results of the embryo selected vs the baseline.
I will never get tired of linking https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-buying-things-from-a-store-faq
That really doesn't seem to apply to the case where a store sells you an item with a promise that it will or won't do a thing 40 years later. Or that it's 10% less likely to do a thing 40 years later. How much class action do you need for a bunch of customers to get together 40 years later and say "hey, this thing you sold me wasn't actually any more likely to do the thing than the version we could have got for free!"
If I go into a store to buy a stand mixer, and they promise to sell me a stand mixer, and then wheel out a concrete mixer - well yeah technically it's a mixer but come off it, mate.
At the moment, I think the technology is at the level of "we can tell you if the embryo has Down's syndrome or CF" and they're promising (but unlikely to deliver on) "if millions of people select on these criteria we supply, then in twenty years time out of the hundreds of thousands of babies born, there may well be an overall 1 point increase in population IQ" but leaving the clients to parse that as "my baby might be 6 points smarter!"
You and your wife are reasonably smart people, she's going to take care of herself during pregnancy, and you as parents are not going to fold, spindle or mutilate any kids you have. So there's a good chance any future babies will turn out okay. Will that be due to the genetic selection? God alone knows! But I'm fairly sure the company does not.
They're selling hope in a bucket and badmouthing their competitors in the effort to grab market share, market advantage, and those sweet, sweet, aspirant dollars before they go as bust as 70s cryonics companies.
I'm guessing (I haven't read any PGS company's offers) that they are promising to do only what they can do - to offer customers the choice of embryos to implant based on the polygenic risk scores they have scored the embryos for. The actual outcome will be indistinguishable from chance on an individual basis, as you say. It's only in retrospect, across hundreds of thousands of people, that any impact will be noticed.
I was trying to think of an analogy, and I think it's like an impressionist painting. Up close, every splash of colour is just a splash of colour. You have to take a good step back to appreciate the image. Up close, each individual is just that, and, except for some Mendelian single-variant conditions, it's impossible to pin down a talent, ability, condition or illness to any one cause. It's only from a distance of hundreds of thousands of people that you can see a pattern.
EDIT: And for that reason, I rather think that what these companies are really selling is a chance for parents to believe they have chosen the best they can for their child.
Here are some potential objections:
1. This allow parents to select sex of a child as well, which could move us away from natural balance in which for every 100 girls 105 boys are born.
2. Selecting for obvious traits like risk for certain diseases, IQ, etc, might also unintentionally select for some and against some other traits that weren't even considered. This too might skew the natural frequency of some traits... making some more prevalent than is optimal, and some less prevalent than is optimal.
3. This opens the can of worms which will allow kids to blame their parents for pretty much any negative outcome in their lives - whatever they did: if they used this technology and kid turns out to be unhappy or to have some disease, they can blame parents for wrong choice; if they didn't use this technology and conceived naturally, kids can blame parents for NOT using this.
4. In general kids lose some of their dignity points by not just coming into their parent's life, but becoming in some ways their explicitly engineered product. Imagine a situation in which a kid is selected for high IQ, and then is pushed by ambitious parents to become some wunderkind or to excel academically, while the kid itself turns out to be completely uninterested in such a thing and would prefer to be a soccer player or a plumber. Imagine the kind of arguments that could ensue. "Did I in vain select you to be so smart? Now you want to waste all that potential?!
- F**k you and your embryo selection! I'm my own person!"
5. If eventually personality traits become a part of the equation, so we can select for them as well, there is a risk that humanity could become much more homogeneous, we could become a society in which popular traits are very frequent, even if "popular" doesn't necessarily mean optimal, especially not on a level of whole population. (For example, for a single person, it might be optimal to have some "good" personality, but for the entire population it might be more optimal if not all people have such "good" personality, and we also have a fair share of quirky people, neurotics, introverts, etc... For example high neuroticism might be required for taking seriously X-risks)
6. Achieving genetic perfection could put more pressure on people to perform, because now they have no excuse. If you fail in life, it's only you to blame.
7. In general it interferes with natural selection and introduces elements of artificial selection. A thing that we do to dogs, for example. Many of the breeds created by this process actually have worse health and fitness than mongrels.
8. There is a open question about how many embryos to select from. It could be 5, 10, 50, 100... or more? Each choice could be criticized.
1 is already an issue. Parents using IVF in the US can select by gender, and apparently it's socially acceptable in educated circles to do so, as long as you are selecting for a girl. In the EU, it's illegal to select by gender (though I'm not sure of how this can be tightly enforced).
Gender-selective abortion bans came about in the EU because, surprise surprise, turns out parents (particularly those of certain ethnicities whose culture place much more value on sons) wanted boys and were aborting girls, even if that was already illegal since they could find a compliant doctor if necessary, although it is a complex question - some studies find a skewed ratio in live births, others don't, and there is a natural ration of 105 male to 100 female live births anyhow.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/abortion/medical/selective_1.shtml
No need to even look at "certain ethnicities", I am telling you: it is now socially acceptable and standard among upper-middle class Americans to place much more value on daughters, it would seem; they discuss how, when doing IVF, they implant only female embryos at first, and use male embryos, if at all, only as a fail-safe. Some women of the same class discuss openly and freely how, if they got pregnant in the natural way, they would abort a male embryo or foetus, exclusively because of its sex. Epistemic warning: anecdotal evidence.
But yes - see the Boaz article I linked to.
Not sure if you, or the companies, have answered this elsewhere, but I can think of two more issues. You've discussed the relative risk of developing the condition, but not the absolute risk, nor the severity of the condition. Some of the conditions tested are exceeding rare, and so even a 90% reduction might not mean much. And to pick breast cancer survival for example, while apparently the risk is rather high for the average woman (about 14%), the outcomes if not diagnosed late are actually pretty good. And you don't know the severity of those who will get the disorder. Maybe the ~7% who do get breast cancer will have a kind that is more aggressive or treatment resistant, which means the the relative risk is misleading and this process is actually not worth it.
The other issue is that in removing these genetics from the gene pool, you're removing beneficial traits that are harder to identify. Lets say that people with schizophrenia genetics are more... adept at being altruistic or something like that. You could develop a society that's perfectly healthy but but there's a statistical predisposition to selfishness that changes the whole culture.