Not sure, look at all the people who are against polygenic screening even in the comments section of this blog heavily selected for utilitarian technophiles.
I agree that if polygenic screening becomes popular, ten years after it's popular everyone (except Alabama judges) will agree that it's good. But I also think it could just get banned before anyone has a chance to have Near Mode opinions on it, or that clinics might just not offer it because it's too weird/creepy, or it might take twenty years longer to catch on than it should. There are definitely people who are already trying to ban it.
I'm also concerned that in a little while it will become easier to polygenically select psychological traits (IQ, niceness, etc), and this will provoke a big enough backlash that people will ban *all* polygenic screening (which tbh will be necessary because it will be pretty hard to allow some kinds but not others).
My only objection — and I am, in fact, being serious here, although I also know it's ultimately a silly concern — is that a large part of my identity comes from "I am a lot smarter than most", and a good chunk after that from stuff like "I am tall" and "I have rare green eyes" and so forth...
...so if it starts to become the case that my IQ is no longer real unusual, and my height becomes average or (God forbid) below-average, and people start picking green eyes for tons of kids... what am I even but an inferior and common fossil?!
It's a joke, but it's also a real problem. If everybody is now guaranteed 120 IQ, that becomes the new "90 IQ normie idiot" and now being smart is 160 IQ, so you pop along to the polygenic selection clinic to make sure Junior is hitting that level.
I know people will say "but what's wrong with a society of geniuses?", what I want them to think about is "what constitutes 'genius' and what if you can't hit the new requirement?" I think inequality and hierarchy, even informal, will still persist even with polygenic superbabies ("poor Todd, he can't even cook a Michelin three star meal while balancing blindfolded on a highwire over Niagara Falls and simultaneously composing an opera while solving the insoluble equations of 2120, why he's not even seven foot nine in height and he's already fourteen years of age!")
Being at the bottom of the hierarchy is still better in a society of material plenty than one of paucity. And that's before you consider that the benefits of being smart and capable aren't entirely about your positioning relative to other people. In a society wherein I am the dumbest of the dumb, I'm still able to read and write, and this is good for its own sake and I would choose this over being top banana in society of proto-humans where I was a razor-wit shaman for being able to build a fire (the pinnacle of tech).
"which tbh will be necessary because it will be pretty hard to allow some kinds but not others"
Why couldn't you write a law saying that polygenic screening companies are allowed to disclose information about A, but not information about B?
I understand this in the context of the child's sex - it's probably correlated with so many other things that you couldn't really redact it. But other things seem bannable.
Interestingly, in China, doctors are not allowed to tell the sex of the fetus, because a very large proportion would choose boy and heavily skew the population.
(The law was passed three decades ago when the country implemented the rigid one-child policy as many families hoped their only child would be a boy because of sexist traditional preferences.)
So really, in specific contexts, it's bannable (but people will still seek the information in illegal ways, no moral judgment here)
I've whined on here before about the fertility clinic offering "choose your baby's eye colour!" as part of their options package, so I think that horse has already left the stable. If it's legal, and you can make money out of it, it's going to happen. 'We only intended to wipe out schizophrenia, we never meant to create Protestant Heaven!'
Well, maybe picking 'tall, smiley, will get into a good university' may be way easier than 'nicer, smarter, mentally healthier, will not invent way to soak billions out of the gullible via appeals to think of the children'.
In case 1, I don't think you're making the relevant comparison. The question is not of the child the woman would have had before she stopped drinking versus the child she has after she stopped drinking; it's of the child she has after she stopped drinking versus how that same child might have turned out had she not stopped drinking. We're not comparing past and present, but two different possible presents.
I agree. Scott says, "In common language, we would say that the doctor’s intervention prevented the baby from getting fetal alcohol syndrome." No, we wouldn't. Because when we say 'the baby' we mean one particular baby. The common language way of describing what happened would be that the doctor's intervention prevented the woman from having an FAS baby. Notice that in that sentence we say *the* woman, because we are talking about that one particular alcoholic woman, but we say *an* alcoholic baby, because we are not talking about a particular baby, but just whatever baby this woman has while still drinking.
If someone said to me "the doctor's treatment prevented the baby from getting FAS" I would take them to be talking about some one, particular baby, not an abstract "future child of this woman". I would assume that they meant that there was some drug or other treatment administered when *the* baby was in utero that somehow protected it from the damage alcohol in the woman's system would have otherwise caused.
That doesn't seem to follow. Here is the woman who has not yet stopped drinking, AND has not gotten pregnant, because if she had, she would hardly be asking, "Should I stop drinking before I become pregnant?" The comparison is between (a) the hypothetical future child that she may conceive after she stops drinking and (b) the hypothetical future child that she may conceive while continuing to drink. Neither child has any more identity than that when she is making the decision. There isn't an actually existing Child of Alcohol or an actually existing Child of Sobriety; there is no chromosomal makeup for either of them, no specific sperm or ovum, not even a specific date of conception for either. So any reasoning that turns on the idea of either of them having a specific identity that goes beyond "conceived sometime in the future of this moment" is making assumptions that were not in the problem as stated.
This is the anti-abortion perspective covered in the last paragraph where the physical instantiation of the fertilized egg gives it rights. The cases are argued from a perspective that intent to have, unfertilized egg, fertilized egg, sperm, have similar moral standing.
Believing a fertilized egg has a right not to be killed makes IVF abhorrent and preempts any objection to the nature of how an surviving egg is selected
"The cases are argued from a perspective that intent to have, unfertilized egg, fertilized egg, sperm, have similar moral standing"
On the anti-abortion side? I've seen the strawman that "you lot believe sperm and eggs are sacred, so why don't you have burials for menstrual pads, that's an egg!" but I didn't expect to see it voiced here as "this is what the anti-abortion set believe".
No. Sperm and unfertilised eggs? Human cells but like blood cells. Not a separate being.
Intending to get pregnant? Good for you, but that's not the same as being pregnant.
Fertilised egg: beginning of separate human life, separate being. This does have moral standing.
IVF? Bringing embryos into existence, then discarding them, or keeping them frozen indefinitely awaiting discarding, or if the implantation is too successful and all the embryos develop, advising the mother to have a selective abortion. Not a good procedure.
Not all anti-abortion/pro-life people have the same views on IVF, by the way.
The hypothetical woman specifically weaned off drinking over a few months to make sure that in this example it's unambiguously a different egg than would have been fertilized had she not gone to the doctor
But there are also many other things she could have done that also would have resulted in her having that same second baby, but without getting sober in between. In this example, there are two separable steps - having a different baby, and preventing it from getting fetal alcohol syndrom - that are simply correlated. With IVF, the fact that you have a different baby *is* what prevents schizophrenia.
The situations are identical, materially, but the intentions are different.
It's a little like arguing whether one of the Twin Towers struck on 9-11 might have actually been a legitimate military target since the CIA had an office there, even if Bin Ladin had no idea about that office when planning the strike. (Though Bin Ladin would still have needed to issue a warning prior to the attack to allow evacuation.) Are we looking at Virtue Ethics vs Utilitarianism, maybe? Applications of virtue ethics which deliver problematic utilitarian outcomes often looks illogical to me. Even if so, Scotts other examples seem to address the matter.
I've never been impressed by the logic of utilitarianism; I'm inclined to say that if virtue ethics leads to outcomes that utilitarianism rejects, so much the worse for utilitarianism.
Even if we ignore the thing about that she'd have a kid earlier, any change would result in different sperm getting there because of chaos. Even if we look at the case where she's already pregnant and deciding to stop drinking, sure the resulting child has the same DNA, but you can say the same of identical twins. They're not the same person, are they? So could you really say that the baby with fetal alcohol syndrome and the one without are the same person?
The 'irrrelevant comparison' is the comparison that Scott is criticizing, and quite fairly, that he believes other people are explicitly making in regards to polygenic screening. The 'relevant comparison' is the comparison that Scott is arguing in favor of.
I honestly do not understand how anyone can object to this. Sure, there are your religious pro-life people with the "god maybe wanted you to have that schizophrenic baby," given their complete lack of empathy for women carrying issue doomed to die shortly after birth, but preventing human suffering, if possible, is a net good.
I think you're perhaps a little harsh on the pro-lifers, but I'm not certain so I won't address that. And, frankly, I'm not one myself so I might distort things if I tried.
I'm also not going to get into the people who oppose this (at least for mental traits) because they believe that genes do not and *must* not have large influence on the mind (due to Marxist/egalitarian/anti-racist ideology), and building technology on the premise that such large influence exists is therefore in their minds futile, blasphemous, and if successful a proof-by-pudding that their worldview is flawed. I will merely note that these people exist, and move on.
So, let's come at this from a secular conservative point of view; we accept that it will have effect, we don't consider it inherently immoral, we're just worried about unintended consequences. And here, we run into the problem that humans do *not* come with blueprints. Natural selection might have designed us, but it didn't give us a cheat-sheet on why things are set the way they are, and we're full of horrible kludges that make reverse-engineering a nightmare. You're playing with what's still to some extent a black box, and while black boxes are manipulable they're notorious for doing things you didn't expect.
The most obvious case of how things could go fatally wrong would be if you selected on genes correlated to income, this selected both for IQ and for sociopathy (since sociopaths are massively overrepresented among CEOs), and you unleashed a generation of IQ-170 supermen who were also 10% sociopaths instead of 1%. The IQ makes the sociopaths more dangerous, not less, and soon your country falls to bits because current solutions to the Byzantine Generals Problem are not capable of dealing with that many defectors. And you don't know what you've done until at the very earliest 15 years or so when crime statistics start to show up (and that dog might not bark, since it tends to be the low-IQ sociopaths that get caught early and often, and also you might not be considering this hypothesis when looking at the data), so good luck fixing it before the state fails. That's a known case, insofar as I was able to think of it. You might be able to avoid that one, if you think of it when designing guidelines for what should and shouldn't be tampered with. But there are assuredly pitfalls that I don't know about, and some of them might be as bad as that one.
TL;DR - the gene pool we've got produces a bunch of people who are mostly capable of getting along. Natural selection is not going to move us out of that sweet-spot very fast, but artificial selection could. As Yudkowsky said, "magic is not for the unparanoid".
I think your entire case here depends on a correlation between high IQ and sociopathy. To the best of my knowledge that's a trope that's not really true, plus where it does apply the sociopathy renders the person incapable of really effective interpersonal relationships (it's not a superpower but a disability). Thus you actually find a higher degree of possible sociopathy in university faculty for disciplines like maths or Latin based essentially on a logical system that can be explored and less in subjects stressing interaction. And that preselects for sociopaths who can cope with the interaction required to get that far through education.
I think, although would welcome correction, that the risk here, assuming that we can't select for high IQ without sociopathy, which is certainly a state that exists, is not a generation of high-IQ CEOs (most ruthless CEOs are probably not sociopaths; humans generally can ignore empathy) but an increased number of potential maths professors.
If you're doing it by mean, I suspect the sign is still positive. Most sociopaths are not violent, and CEOs and other high corporate climbers make *much* more money than average so one of them is worth a lot more than one prisoner.
The case depends on a correlation between high income and sociopathy rather than high IQ. The suggested danger is that we end up creating a population that is more dangerous to society and more numerous than would be naturally occurring and we do it by taking individual steps (seeking high income) that make sense but in aggregate cause a bad outcome.
Many of the responses seem to focus on the specific iq/sociopath combination, but if there are any extremely deleterious aggregations that you get to by following sensible individual steps then this is a problem, regardless of exactly which traits cause it.
I think the argument makes sense but my own estimate of how seriously we should take it is relatively low. I don't think we are likely to hit on traits that make sense in isolation but in aggregate destroy society, I think society is fairly robust and able to cope with many different sized populations of many different kinds of people. Still, it's a good argument for some level of caution.
To be clear, I am not saying that doing this will definitely explode in your face. It might go well, or it might screw up in fixable ways only (to take an implausible example, if 10% of your superbabies chainsaw off their own heads on their 16th birthday, that's bad, but it doesn't take your entire country down with it any more than thalidomide did and you can learn from it). I'm pointing out that it won't definitely not explode in your face, because the task I was given was to make val "understand how anyone can object to this".
Consider another hypothetical (but keep in mind that the whole thought experiment is based on what we *don't know* about how genetics interconnects, so even if you don't think the specific case is true, the thought experiment is much larger than that).
What if the genes for schizophrenia are linked to human creativity. That for every XXX creative people, we get someone whose mind works outside of expected and healthy bounds and we call them schizophrenic, but it has the same root genetic cause. If we severely restrain possible schizophrenics, we may inadvertently remove creative people - artists, writers, visionary architects, whatever. I don't think we can fix that once it happens.
Or for something more contrived and less "maybe so" - what if we intentionally bred aggressiveness out of the population? Like, less fighting, less murder, less domestic abuse. Sounds great. So in 50 years whoever participated in this plan would have almost no violent crime, a clear win for policy! Then a country that didn't do that threatens the non-aggressive neighbors and maybe invades. Oops, nobody in the peaceful country is willing to fight back and gets conquered, choosing to live as second-class citizens or slaves rather than fight back.
Again, these are just thought-experiment hypotheticals about unforeseen consequences. Reality might be far harder to predict and far worse - like susceptibility to viruses or creating a new genetic defect that makes someone sterile.
For one thing, this all assumes essentially universal adoption. Polygenic screening is somewhat invasive and expensive, so uptake will be slow.
Lets say schizophrenia is linked to creativity. Is it the only source of creativity? Probably not. Are we talking about having 10% fewer schizophrenics and 2% fewer artists? This seems like a small enough effect that we catch it before it does serious damage. Honestly, in the modern world with x billion people we probably *need* fewer revolutionary artists than we once did.
Also, it's possible to just not select on +110IQ intellectual traits at all. We can stick to addressing metabolic issues, cancer, and maybe intellect related problems like phenylketoneuria.
"I don't think we can fix that once it happens."
Why not? I mean, as a general heuristic if you only select against genes that have a less than 1% prevalence in the population, you're probably not going to drastically alter the human character in any irrevocable way.
I think the worst case scenario is something like 'increased vulnerability to epidemic infection if odd polymorphisms are removed.' But we're probably at the point where improved GDP is enough to justify fighting plagues with vaccines rather than genetic polymorphisms.
"Oops, nobody in the peaceful country is willing to fight back and gets conquered"
I think there's a big difference between "A 5% reduction in murders" and "we have no soldiers whatsoever." This is assuming that polygenic selection is far more powerful than it is. And even if we assumed it was that powerful we'd still have Nintendo Pilots and people willing to shoot others with guns. We'd maybe lose some of our knife fighters, but does modern warfare really hinge on them?
I mean, simply put I suspect that human plasticity is sufficient to prevent most of these cases from becoming catastrophic, without some really, really long time frames to play with.
I agree insofar as the optimal amount of schizophrenia might well be non-zero. As long as IVF combined with polygenic screening is a rather rare beast for most children born (much less than 0.1%), denying it to parents with high-risk genes seems just cruel. - Otoh: Scott carries at least one "problematic" gene -and some for OCD - thus, he and his wife might choose an embryo who is not a carrier. Among Ashkenazi, there are several known "issues" that seem somehow to be connected with exceptional intelligence and/or talent. ...
This sounds a little like the paperclip optimizer problem applied to IQ / genetics. The danger of improved performance capabilities is, potentially, a reduction in satisficing behavior.
While members of the rationalist community are a bit more resistant to bias than the general public, one issue I see cropping up again and again is assuming that there are not certain baseline risks inherent in the "status quo." There's some argument that genetic load in humans is increasing over time. Improved medicine means that some people who would have died out instead continue to live. We've shied away from this notion because the last attempt at a 'eugenics movement' was such an unmitigated Human Rights catastrophe. But there are likely costs to 'doing nothing.' And they may become worse with enough time, even to the point of becoming an existential risk.
So yes, improving IQ via polygenic screening specifically might increase the risk of, say, drug use. But polygenic screening shouldn't need to be risk free. It should just need to be lower risk. At the very least we should be able to point to cases where the risk-benefit ratio is high enough, even with incomplete evidence, that intervention is probably beneficial.
I mean, technically the whole 'butterfly effect causes Hitler to come to power' applies to every action we take every day of our lives. But we shouldn't allow that "Pascal's Wager" keep us frightened and in bed all day.
Over long enough timescales, with enough gained information about what does what from limited runs with substantial monitoring? Sure. I did only say that natural selection wouldn't move us out of the sweet spot *very fast*, not that it wouldn't at all.
YOLO rolling it out to a significant fraction of the general public, though, seems like the risks are a lot bigger than they need to be. Dysgenics is slow; we don't need such dangerous levels of haste to deal with it in time.
I will note that there are some political problems with attempting to do this sanely, most obviously the dilemma of "if the vibes are that this is dangerous, you will get eaten by ethicists calling you Dr. Mengele and/or Dr. Frankenstein; if the vibes are that this is safe, you will get eaten by people demanding that you approve it RTFN so they can use it". Don't know what to do about that.
I mean, technically, all of this is slow. Most people ware not going to get polygenic selection now, especially if they don't already need IVF. Only 2% of births are from IVF. Only a fraction of that 2% are likely to opt for polygenic selection. And only a fraction of the mainstream population will want it, perhaps those who are found to already be at high risk, genetically. The process of egg extraction is at least a little invasive, about the equivalent of laproscopic surgery, I believe. Getting polygenic screening meanings also getting the equivalent of IVF, unless I'm mistaken.
"Dysgenics is slow; we don't need such dangerous levels of haste to deal with it in time."
As an ex-risk? I agree wholeheartedly. On the other hand, reducing diabetes, cancer, and other serious illnesses would be beneficial right now and would very likely yield more good than harm.
I agree that there are messy political problems with rolling this out. But I'd rather deal with the technical cost-benefit first and leave the 'vibes' to other, later people There's a compromise position, though, where this is 'rolled out' only in extreme cases, with higher and higher hanging fruit picked over time. If you're legit fighting cancer (though maybe not only cancer), people are a lot less likely to call you Dr. Frankenstein.
I'm all for early approval. I think we can do better than random selection right now. Whether it gets funded by insurance for everyone who wants it is a different story.
The question is whether human life per se is sacred, or only human life without suffering. It seems to me that nowadays human life only has value if it is absent of suffering (hence widespread acceptance of euthanasia, abortion etc). Human life in and of itself is no longer sacred (unless we're talking about capital punishment for serial murderers, then it's still sacred).
I believe suffering is (unfortunately) an intrinsic part of all human life, thus it is an incredible arrogance to believe we can decide who should live or die based on our assumptions of how much or how little that theoretical person will suffer in their theoretical life.
Indeed if we start selectively aborting, where does it stop? Or, more importantly, why does it stop? What reasons become valid reasons to abort or to not abort?
(Needless to say I am one of the pro-lifers, anti-IVFs, who apparently has a "complete lack of empathy for women"...)
I really hope you will live with a really terrible suffering to experience yourself in full, how suffering is a part of human life. Also, I hope all your doctors tell you that they don't want to give you painkillers. With reasoning that if you use any painkillers, then you'll use oxycodone and heroin next, because obviously you won't stop.
I don't see wishing this person to suffer to be advancing the argument.
Besides, your wish will come true: this person *will* suffer, or else die quickly. The same fate is in store for me, and for you, and everyone else here. In the meantime, there's a lot of arguments to be had.
Well, I am more of a pragmatic kind. If someone cannot be swayed by arguments, maybe can be swayed by emotions and personal experience. I just believe it is unethical to think that human life with a little suffering is the same as with a lot of suffering. IMO, pain is the worst that can happen, and it is much better to live less then to live longer and suffer.
I think most people think otherwise, until they are old and in pain. When this happens, they split in a more even proportion.
All I can say that I am suffering, and I value my life less. I am ready to "spend" it if, for example, I am given 10M for it that I can give to charities of my choice.
I am 95% sure I wouldn't have this thinking if I did not suffer.
I don't see how arrogance is involved. The whole point of Scott's article was that no matter what you do, you're making decisions that one person will live and another will not. Since you have to make those decisions, why not make them in the way that will on average reduce suffering?
Also, if life is so sacred, why would you argue against IVF, without which fewer children would be born full stop?
The pro-life position is that human life is sacred, therefore you can't kill humans. (Many make an exception for executing murderers, as murderer's are humans that have violated the sacred taboo of "don't kill humans"). The value pro-lifers are aiming at is "minimize the amount of murders" not "maximize the amount of human beings".
For the record, I am anti-capital punishment as well (though extremely pro "life-imprisonment means life-imprisonment"), I just don't understand how the typical extreme supporters of abortion rights are also the extreme anti-capital-punishment crowd. I don't understand the criteria they use to consider a serial rapist/murderer's life as being sacred, but not the life of an unborn human being.
And indeed valuing existing human life does not equate to being in favour of (artificially) fabricating new human lives. Or are people who are against murder also supposed to be against birth control?
Assigning value to people based on attributes (suffering for example) is problematic because arguments based on such values tend to offend our sense of individual humanity and often lead directly to decisions that are widely viewed as evil, or at least very wrong. (Eugenics anyone?) Some truly great art was produced by people because they were suffering. Emily Dickenson? Should society have relieved Beethoven of his cruelly isolated life of deafness and left us without some of his best work? My last few years brought on suffering I could not have imagined, and only now am I allowed essentially unlimited painkillers. However, I regard these as good years for so many reasons that have nothing to do with pain. I prefer Scott's framing that starts with a decision and then chooses the path that leads to the better outcome. This can be worked out without placing different values on people (or cells or whatever).
The point would be that embryos are not alive (yet). We already selectively abort in many countries in the case of chromosomal development disorders. Is human life worth/valued less as a result in Iceland? That does not seem to be the case.
>The point would be that embryos are not alive (yet).
I would phrase this differently. I would say that embryos are not _people_ (yet), since, e.g. they don't yet have a single neuron to their name, let alone personality, memory etc.
But they are alive, in the generally accepted sense that e.g. a single human muscle cell is alive. It metabolizes, it can synthesize proteins etc.
I don't object to it. And I'm an atheist, too. But there are definitely a lot of things about the idea of genetic screening that I do not like:
-It is going to be very expensive for quite a while, so only well-off people can take advantage of it. It will be another instance of "the rich get richer." only with this they won't just be getting further and further beyond the poor in money, but also in having a healthy constitution,physical attractiveness, intelligence, athleticism, etc. Seems like it's going to make the rich/poor even divide larger and harder to cross.
-There is something special about making your child via sex. It makes both children and sex more magical. Giving that up seems like a significant loss to me.
-You know that feeling when you get to create an avatar, and feel sort of excited about what you can make with all the different choices, and then you see that what it comes down to is about 7 categories (hair color, etc.) and 5 choices in each, and suddenly you lose you sense of there being a whole world of wild possibilities? I'm not crazy about baby-making getting more like that. Screening for illnesses seems OK to me, but choosing physical and mental traits seems a lot less so. Things get more boring, less varied and unexpected. You know how in a lot of games you get dealt a hand, either literally, as in card games, or metaphorically. And that is part of what makes the game fun -- playing the hand you've been dealt. There's something I like about playing the hand you've been dealt in life, too. And we are built to do it. We may do less well if we can choose too many of our cards.
Your first point is great and worthy of emphasis. And I get your second point. But your third,
>And that is part of what makes the game fun -- playing the hand you've been dealt. There's something I like about playing the hand you've been dealt in life, too.
I like this in video games too, but it’s fun because the stakes are negligible, and in a game you can get as many hands/lives/characters as you want. I’m sure you’ve met real people who’ve been dealt a really shitty hand (substantial cognitive struggles/disfigurement) and you wouldn’t consider their source of suffering, their dealt hand, part of what makes life fun. I know you said screening for illnesses is fine (which I definitely agree with) but particularly with mental illness, the line’s fuzzy sometimes.
And you start your third point by saying you love the variety of traits available in custom character generation because it provides you with more trait choices. I don’t think your value of trait selection in games jibes with your objection to trait selection in life. Both are in essence a kind of character customization.
What I said in the third point may not have been clear. What I meant was that the idea of a custom-made avatar seems thrilling, I usually find when I get around to making it that my enthusiasm fades. There aren't really that many categories to make choices in, and not that many choices in each category, and all the results look similar, really -- all like little avatars. But I agree this situation isn't really a great comparison. But there's something in it. I have grim imaginings of a future where everybody looks like Barbie or Ken .
But about playing the hand you've been dealt: I think people enjoy that even when the stakes are not negligible. For instance, I enjoy rock climbing and backpacking, & so do a lot of other people. And in both, once you're far enough from your starting point that simply returning to it is not practical or safe, you just have to make it work -- whatever's there in the rockface, the landscape, the weather, the state of your gear, etc. I think that's why sports like that make people feel so alive. I'm sure there are many activities that have that play-the-hand-you've-been-dealt quality, with stakes that aren't negligible but medium-sized or high. We are probably engineered to thrive best in life situations that have a fair amount of that sort of thing.
I don't know what to do about bad cards, especially bad "mental health" cards. Some of them are associated with extraordinary talents, especially bipolar. Both poets and stand-up comics have very high rates of what's called affective illness in the trade, but if you know one or read their autobiography it is clear that being them is often delightful. And society needs them! They give us insight, and new ways of thinking about things, and permission to acknowledge things, and great enjoyment. They wake us up. People on the autism spectrum often have extraordinary gifts too.
And even the cards that seem purely bad may have some benefit, even for the individual that has them. Would Hawking have done the work he did if he did not have ALS? Maybe he would have just been a physics professor somewhere, preoccupied with tenure and getting laid and the family finances. And I have known many people who have been dealt bad life event cards who have responded to them by becoming experts on life events of that kind, or becoming unusually kind and empathic, or just by zooming off to some career or lifestyle that's as far as possible from the b.l.e., and thriving there.
Then again, I have many times presented a strawman in these comment threads explicitly because i did not know the steelman and wanted to be presented with it
so like
the steelman is that your argument proves too much, and would perhaps condone euthenizing other net-negative-lives without the consent of those individuals
consent is a *really really good* schelling point when it comes to euthenization of net-negative-value lives
anything that messes with that schelling point, honestly more of a schelling fence, is a pretty serious problem
even if it doesn't work very well with net-negative-value lives who are incapable of giving consent
"given their complete lack of empathy for women carrying issue doomed to die shortly after birth"
So let's murder them now, that's so much more kind and nice!
Hey, why not murder the parents of the schizophrenic baby while we're at it? They've already demonstrated they have inferior genetics which produce undesirable offspring, why give them the chance to keep spawning schizo babies? It's way kinder all round to put them out of their and our misery!
Yes, a very weird argument: “This child might die very early, so let’s kill the child even earlier”?
How quickly will we get from “it’s compassionate and correct to use IVF to select only the children who have the best chance of a happy life” to “it is uncompassionate and wrong (and therefore immoral) to have a child who has an elevated risk of x y or defects/illnesses”?
If I had listened to good moral and medical sense of this kind, my firstborn would not be alive, because her genotype is *absolutely certain* to cause a crippling genetic ailment that results in early death—only it didn’t and they still don’t understand why, and now it turns out many more have this genotype and no illness either.
There was a sad case, after we permitted limited legal abortion in my country, of this kind. Parents were told due to a prenatal check that the child (or to spare the sensibilities of those who are 'it's not a child, it's only potentially a person', the foetus) had Edwards' Syndrome, and decided to abort based on that.
Then afterwards it turned out that this was a mistaken diagnosis and the foetus would have been a healthy boy. The couple sued over this.
Yes. What's especially funny in my case is that the genetic screens continue to be 'positive.' (Providence, I think, that my wife and I are dedicatedly pro-life, and just elected not to do most screening at all.) And that's because, as years later I have discovered, the entire understanding of particular genes involved is flat wrong: many genes which are certain to lead to "severe disease" are not certain to lead to any disease phenotype at all. Many of the organizations researching it have had the evidence for 20+ years but are reluctant to change standards of diagnosis and care in the literature because (as near I can tell) a discovery to that effect would greatly decrease estimates of disease prevalence and therefore lead to a decrease in research funding for cures.
I wonder how many other abortions are conducted because of false positives, or in situations where even a true positive indicates only a chance of a diseased phenotype.
I think it's mostly an extension of the good anti-eugenics heuristic we culturally evolved in the 20th century into an environment it's not suited for.
Do you understand how many people object to cheapest novel of making better people: cloning the best people. No deciding if PGI good or not, no wearysome process of extracting eggcells for IFV. Just simple cloning.
This is literally my politics - I'm a single issue voter: My single issue vote is "we need to clone Lee Kuan Yew 200 times, and make him dictator-for-life of the ~200 nations."
Why LKY? He's the only trench-proven Philosopher-King that we have DNA for. There's a couple of other historical leaders we might try, but there's no DNA and their stories won't be as well attested as LKY's anyways.
I haven't had occasion to exercise my single issue vote yet, but hope abides!
I don't know if I can add much to Deiseach in terms of a steelman, and I am in Scott's camp, but my steelman would be that opponents are reasoning by moral analogy. A lot of people would find it objectionable to bear triplets then kill the one least likely to succeed. It's monstrous, it exhibits a lack of respect for the loser triplet's personhood, etc. Then you move back to the day before birth and perform a selective abortion, and it looks kind of the same morally to a lot of people. Then you move another day back, etc.
I think Scott's right that most people who object to "playing God" by choosing among a set of fetuses to decide which one gets to live are probably opposed to IVF in general, but I can see them arguing that it's an *additional* harm that we're saying that one of the six fetuses has more right to live than the other five because of its superior genes.
But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term.
I think that there is such an argument, if you accept the premise. Polygenic selection makes IVF more popular, so more people will do it. This is the reason that we make it illegal to pay for murder — it makes murder more popular. You still have to accept the non-selection is homicide premise to get to that conclusion, but the structure of your argument was that you were momentarily accepting it for the sake of your argument.
> This is the reason that we make it illegal to pay for murder — it makes murder more popular.
I don't think that's why we make it illegal to pay for murder. Rather, we have decided that when people cooperate to commit a crime, all the persons working together to commit that crime bear individual responsibility for that crime. We call it a "conspiracy". When Person A has paid Person B to murder Person C, then Person B is guilty of murder and Person A is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. If Person C does not die, then Person A is guilty of conspiracy to commit attempted murder.
But the person who actually commits the murder is guilty of both murder and conspiracy. So they have personal responsibility twice? This isn't relevant to the topic at hand, but it's just something I always thought seemed silly.
Perhaps a rational solution would be to have state-approved certified murderers, trained in painless methods of murder. (They would also respect victim's preferences about organ donation or cryonics.) If you hire the state-approved murderer and he gets caught, you still go to prison for murder. But if you perform an unprofessional murder, the penalty for "murder without license" will be much greater.
The murderer has no legal responsibility to avoid getting caught, but we should expect that the ones who don't get caught will be more popular on the market. (Problem is, how will they advertise the fact, without getting caught as a consequence? But that's not my problem.) The murderer's legal responsibility is to make it painless and respect the victim's preference about how to handle the body.
I want to get certified as a potential murderer. How do I get certified? Do I have to prove I have the requisite skills, or just the inclination? How often must I get re-certified?
As a customer, I'll want to check the certification is valid, and maybe check references on my potential murderer. "Four stars - respected the client's organ donation preferences with a quick decapitation, with minimal pain, and preserving all parts with a nearby refrigerator. Was a little untimely, but one must remember that a popular murderer has many clients and these things can take time. Would contract to murder again."
Outside of the obvious moral implications, this would be bad because the state-approved murderer would take little personal risk, as his action is not illigal. This would potentially allow him to go to greater length to finish the job. Specializing, while avoiding prison time would also potentially make the state-murderer better at his job compared to other hired killers - potentially increasing the rate of murders overall.
The conspiracy occurs once two or more people agree to commit the illegal act, and take some material step towards that goal. This is important, because it allows law enforcement to arrest the conspirators before the illegal act occurs, or is even attempted.
I think you have put the rabbit in the hat. You say,
Rather, we have decided that when people cooperate to commit a crime, all the persons working together to commit that crime bear individual responsibility for that crime.
Why have we decided that? To disincentivize cooperating in the commission of the crime — to make it less popular, as I originally phrased it.
It's also to punish more harshly because it's more difficult to catch. If disincentive = P(getting caught) * punishment, then if P() is smaller you want to increase punishment.
I think we make it illegal to pay for murder because it's a wrong in itself'. In fact I don't see how it's significantly different from murder in the normal sense; you're deliberately causing the death of another with your actions.
Another metaphor would be if every time someone is murdered, 10% of the victim’s wealth went to charities in the murderer’s area. After the fact, the donation clearly improves world utility, but the rule means that people have a reason to want to kill each other.
I should chastise myself for only identifying the utilitarian incentives-oriented theory of punishment. But I think you get to the same position for other theories of punishment. For example, if you think that criminal punishment is to make a communicable moral statement, the same logic holds.
Also socially we would generally consider specifically killing lots of schizophrenic people as more evil than killing the same number of people at random
> It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term.
It's also more crisply totally incompatible with PGT-M. This line of argument doesn't allow discarding an embryo which inherited Huntington's Disease, where a person could live a couple healthy decades first.
I don't think the "life begins at conception" people honestly have thought through these cases carefully so I don't want to say it's a reasoned argument against PGT-M, but the two can't really coexist.
> I don't think the "life begins at conception" people honestly have thought through these cases carefully
In my experience, many of them *have* thought it through. They just say that it's "God's will" and leave those families out to dry. They fully understand the implications; they just believe that taking action to avoid it is immoral.
I think there are two groups of people here. Group one is opposed to abortion because it feels like killing a baby. They have not grappled with the difficult bioethics questions and probably see no contradiction between their pro-life stance and being excited about their friend starting IVF after years of failing to get pregnant. Group two has grappled with the bio-ethical questions and to still be consistent has to take a pretty hard-line stance against IVF, the morning after pill, and some forms of birth control. I think with the recent ruling in Alabama, we're going to see that group one is much larger than group two. I think the political dynamics of the abortion conflict are going to shift away from consistent life-begins-at-conception believers having much ability to affect public policy.
A lot of those who have grappled with the implications are themselves perfectly willing to live with the consequences, as painful as they may be at times. I've known couples who have lost their babies to a known issue moments after birth. I also know couples who have raised severely disabled children, many of them having known the child was going to be born with those limitations. They genuinely seem content with their choices despite the pain - i.e. they made a reasoned choice that what they were doing was better than the alternative (abortion in this case).
These are also the same type of people who stay with a severely disabled spouse or donate a lot of time to caregiving and foster care.
I also agree that these people represent a small minority of the pro-life crowd, and that the less intentional people will prefer to compromise (6-15 weeks for abortion, like in Europe) rather than face the difficult consequences of these situations.
"Group two has grappled with the bio-ethical questions and to still be consistent has to take a pretty hard-line stance against IVF, the morning after pill, and some forms of birth control."
This assumes all positions against abortion have to be deontologist. It's perfectly possible to hold an "IVF being an option is better than IVF not being an option, but it's still morally complex and murky" stance. (This can come with interesting side positions, like being pro-transferring-lots-of-embryos.)
In the real world, people routinely land at stances like this. Very, very few people either believe 100% or 0% in fetal personhood. The parents of IVF embryos routinely have complex moral quandaries over what to do with embryos, and feel bad about just discarding them. People pay the monthly fee to keep embryos stored for years and years, even if they don't think they want more kids, because they can't bear to make a decision.
For what it's worth, the scientific consensus is that neither Plan B (what people usually call the “morning-after pill”) nor ella (a newer drug with a different mechanism of action) prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. Both operate almost entirely by preventing ovulation, and maybe secondarily by preventing fertilization.
I must be way out of the loop, because I cannot imagine someone who is not opposed to IVF based on “life begins at conception” grounds but is opposed to embryo selection because people should be born with diseases (and it’s somehow bad to prevent that). I don’t know anyone like this and my theory of mind is also failing me here
I think it's discomfort with judging people with certain conditions as "unworthy of being born." To get into the theory of mind, imagine the technique was developed back when homosexuality was considered a disease, and used to select against potential homosexuals being born. Or if your politics are different, imagine woke IVF clinics selecting against genes for high testosterone in order to prevent the disease of toxic masculinity.
I don't know where they would draw the line on what's a clear disease though. Maybe they don't? I can imagine arguing that an embryo with a genetic disease that kills in childhood "deserves to enjoy her precious few years" or something.
It's possible to also be in denial about their denial long enough to let the IVF eugenic clinic do its thing. Many people out there just do not feel a strong need to be ideologically consistent, especially if they believe their quality of life is on the line in some way.
I remember after Dobbs, there was an argument I heard a lot about how the laws being passed might even stop a woman from getting an abortion if she found out her baby had Down Syndrome. Apparently you can test for it a few weeks into pregnancy.
I generally support the right to abortion. Arguments about how the parents often won't be able to provide for the child, or how they'll go on to disproportionately commit crime and generally be maladjusted, are quite convincing to me
However, I can't think of a less sympathetic argument than "we need to abort people with Down syndrome before they have the misfortune of existing." That just sounds utterly demonic
The difference is that other arguments are either about stopping bad things from being done to the child, or about broad utilitarian arguments that aren't really about individuals. I don't consider Down syndrome a horrific disease, it's part of the beautiful diversity of human existence, and it's indefensible to systematically eradicate people you happen to find distasteful. I'm less rosy about schitzophrenia, possibly because I've seen its negative effects personally, but the class of argument is definitely a slippery slope
(I'm not claiming my opposition to Down syndrome screening is rational or good, just describing a worldview)
It may be clown world to you, but that's pretty much the nub of it. "We do not deem people to be genetically undesirable and then discard them for that reason" is a towering monumental value for many, worth putting up with a few minor absurdities (such as "we don't actually believe embryos are people, but this is clearly intended to ensure that a certain kind of person disappears, so it's bad") to uphold.
I don't think I'm sufficiently convinced that the slope is slippery (the actual ferocious fight can be held off till we get to purported intelligence eugenics, which is what this is really about) to endorse this position, but I'm directionally sympathetic to it.
We have real life examples of societies aborting, for instance, girls as being less desirable. This has had real world negative impacts. Just because you don't find someone's existence preferable doesn't make you right.
There's also the question of how we value human life after birth. If society comes to the point where we agree that a Down Syndrome baby should never have been born, how long will it take before we are euthanizing Down Syndrome babies who are already born, or perhaps even adults? How long before society is making a decision to remove other, already alive, undesirables from society?
And that's not a hypothetical - obviously Nazi Germany did this but I don't want to Godwin this conversation. I bring it up to remind people why some of us have such strong heuristics against this whole realm of action. Arguably Canada is doing a lighter version of this *right now* through the MAID program. They're offering death to a pretty wide range of situations, including *poverty*. Do you think a society that accepts that would balk at trying to convince severely disabled but content people (who cost the state money to support) that they should kill themselves?
Just for a ground-level argument against not being against Down syndrome: it often causes quite bad physical health problems, which are not beautiful from the point of view of the sufferer. Also there is, I think, an argument that we should also care about the other individuals affected by the birth of a Down child; some families definitely do well enough in such a situation, while others absolutely don't. It can turn some happy grown-ups into deeply unhappy grown-ups (especially when their child with the Down syndrome is visibly suffering from the physical side of the problem), and ruin the childhoods of siblings.
This makes me think of common arguments against consuming animals and animal products. (To be clear, I'm not comparing people to animals or making an argument one way or another.) That it's unethical, even immoral, and animals are not ours to use in such a way. Which, if we completely ended the practice tomorrow, would mean many animals that would have otherwise been bred for the purpose of consuming them and/or their products would instead simply never come into the world in the first place.
When it comes to selectively terminating otherwise viable pregnancies because of confirmed or potential serious health issues, and raising livestock, ultimately the choice boils down to bringing a life into the world with the understanding it could (or will) end unnaturally early, possibly (perhaps certainly) suffering a great deal in the time it has to live vs. never getting to live at all.
Which is better? Which is worse? Preventing suffering is good - but can we really ever be certain that an entity we prevented from existing because it would have suffered and possibly die early necessarily would have agreed with that decision if they had been able to weigh in?
I think this may be one of those questions in life that just cannot be answered. Instead, when faced with such decisions we must factor in other considerations to arrive at a conclusion (e.g. the needs of the mother, which is absolutely a valid consideration, or the precise nature and extent of the anticipated suffering), but ultimately the core dilemma remains unresolved.
> I don't consider Down syndrome a horrific disease, it's part of the beautiful diversity of human existence, and it's indefensible to systematically eradicate people you happen to find distasteful.
You have an extremely rosy view of Down Syndrome that is not accurate in any way, shape, or form. Having a Down Syndrome child often ruins the lives of all family members involved - parents, siblings, those siblings' future children when the parents get too old to care for the Down Syndrome child and foist the care onto the adult siblings... everyone. Everyone suffers.
> However, I can't think of a less sympathetic argument than "we need to abort people with Down syndrome before they have the misfortune of existing." That just sounds utterly demonic
I think "force entire families into destitution and misery because they had the misfortune of conceiving a Down Syndrome child, when you could very easily prevent all that misery" is even more demonic.
To be clear, I would never advocate for a *legal mandate* to abort/embryo select away from chromosomal abnormalities. Some families do end up somewhat okay, and I would never force a couple to not continue the pregnancy if they wanted to try. But the vast, vast majority of families do not do ok. Studies that track the outcomes of these families spend most of their pages quibbling over the exact distinction between "bad" and "very bad" outcomes.
As soon as it becomes socially acceptable to abort (like in Europe), then >90% of couples abort.
...And then they go on to live happy lives with healthy children. *That is unequivocally a good thing.*
This is an empirical question. Down syndrome is either like Autism and Schitzophrenia or it's like dwarfism and being deaf.
I haven't seen a write-up like that one about how miserable it is to have Down syndrome, and if I did I would probably change my tune.
Also, Scott's article acknowledges that these things can just be symbolic and that's okay under the right circumstances. My opinion on this has no real consequence, but there are some artists with Down syndrome whose work I really appreciate, and I'm more invested in my relationship with that community than my non-existent impact on abortion rates. Or, "Scott doesn't hate people who say things shouldn't be cured, he hates people who write Vox articles"
Something like 90% of fetuses with down syndrome are aborted. I’m curious if you think you would decide against it if you were an expecting parent? Consider the implications for the following decades of your life - and of the child’s life, if you have the option to have another. Perhaps you are part of the 10%. Are you confident this is the right choice for all families?
First off, if you frame it as "the parents won't be able to care for special needs children" then it's shaped much more like the arguments that I find convincing. One can imagine that other more well-resourced families will keep having these children and it's just a matter of placement, which makes it less distasteful
As for me personally, I have highly non-rational feelings about parenthood, for reasons. I'd like to imagine myself being willing to raise special-needs children. However, I can't have children, so I get to have abstract principled stances that never need to be tested against reality. And no, I don't plan to adopt special needs children because it sounds really hard. That feels different to me, but objectively it's at least a bit hypocritical.
Notably, I don't claim to be a good moral actor here. I wouldn't necessarily volunteer, but I still think it would be good if I were forced into it. Voluntary action isn't always an expression of moral preference
I've faced this hypothetical. My fifth child had markers for Down syndrome and the Ob/Gyn raised the possibility of abortion on those grounds. My wife and I are serious, active Latter-day Saints. We kept the baby. He doesn't have Down syndrome, for which I'm grateful; we've already got one other child who has autism severe enough that she'll probably need to live with us or other family for the rest of her life.
But it did mean that we were done having kids. Too much risk of a severe disability, and I don't trust my own good intentions to overcome the real stress of caring for a child with as severe a disability as Down syndrome is.
> To get into the theory of mind, imagine the technique was developed back when homosexuality was considered a disease, and used to select against potential homosexuals being born.
I don't really get it. Imagine that the technique is developed right now. It will still be used to select against homosexuals being born. For a child to become homosexual defeats the purpose of having the child.
That is an adjustment that gets you from "For a child to become homosexual completely defeats the purpose of having the child" to "For a child to become homosexual almost completely defeats the purpose of having the child", which leaves the conclusion "as long as the technique exists, it will be used to select against homosexuality" in place.
>I don't really get it. Imagine that the technique is developed right now. It will still be used to select against homosexuals being born.
I would also expect this to happen (on average). Generally speaking, even with LGBTQ+ rights, I think it is reasonably clear that homosexuals have generally harder lives than heterosexuals, and parents generally prefer to spare their children avoidable pain.
>For a child to become homosexual defeats the purpose of having the child.
Huh??? Could you elaborate? ( I, personally, am childfree, so I have the advantage of not needing to articulate a purpose for having a child at all... ) What purpose do you have in mind? Do you expect everyone to agree with it? Or at least all parents to agree to it?
My old anatomy textbook from college mentioned that a fairly large percentage of fertilized embryos pass without implanting. (Just looked it up again and Google says 10%-40%.) I think it you're asking the question, "when does a woman have a moral obligation to a fertilized egg?" it doesn't make sense to set the bar before implantation. Otherwise, you'd need to worry about embryos that naturally fail to implant. But you'd never even know about them anyway, most of the time.
I'd say action > consequences > responsibilities is probably more accurate. I'm just saying that there's a period between fertilization and implantation where embryos sometimes die without anyone caring one whit about them. If so, I don't see the ethical difference between a failed implantation and a prevented implantation.
Agreed, but the question isn't whether we're stripping away life so much as attaching an ethical duty of care. As a rule, we don't attach an ethical duty of care based on need alone, devoid of circumstance. If there are starving children in Kenya I may feel a moral desire to help those children, but society doesn't attach a duty of care for me to do so. If there are starving children in my own house I do have a duty of care to those children.
Well, yes, that's what you'd say, but most of the people who want to stop IVF work internally on a you-broke-it-you-buy-it model. They would say something like, "Nature is allowed to kill as many people with earthquakes and hurricanes as He wants, and you don't have a duty to build stronger houses to save them, but if *you* shake someone's house to death, that's your problem."
It's the difference between a baby that dies of SIDS and one that is smothered with a cushion. Lots of babies suffocate and die naturally, that doesn't make it okay to take an action to ensure that outcome occurs.
I can see why you're drawing this connection, though I don't agree that it's the same. One seems more like swerving out of the way to avoid an object in the road, vs. swerving to hit it. I think reasonable people can interpret the situation in both ways, though.
As I've yet to meet an argument for the rights of embryos (and for clarity I regard these as weak arguments) that doesn't ultimately derive from a conception of the soul, and therefore God's will. I think your objection is therefore likely to be simply overrode by a God's will argument: it is up to the relevant deity whether an embryo implants or not. It's intellectually highly consistent, and does mean that theirs an argument that we are playing God by selecting embryos, not because God requires all embryos to implant but because it is for God to choose.
Arguments of that sort always make me wonder how the arguer originally learned which things humans are allowed to try to control and which things we aren't. Is there a list somewhere?
Well yes. It's implicit in the interpretation of the relevant scripture and/or teachings. That the implicit list may not be obvious to unbelievers is clearly no objection to its validity. And those who claim to be believers but have different lists are wrong or even unbelievers as well.
Facetiousness aside, there's no single list because different interpretations exist in all religious traditions (and indeed in secular philosophy). That the current lists tend to be heavily biased against deviations from patriarchal models is probably not some attempt to oppress people through misogyny etc, but simply because religions are normally long-established and therefore have a body of teachings that were developed when that was the social norm.
We must travel very different circles, then. The "biblical origin" of pro-life sentiments I've come across is "thou shalt not kill". Maybe I don't know the Bible well enough (or interpret it differently - which everyone does) but I don't know where it says "once the egg is fertilized that's when God puts the soul into it, and that's when the commandment against killing begins." Since being anti-murder is near universal in modern society, the biblical contribution to the discussion isn't what in dispute. It certainly doesn't answer the question of whether/when murder can be considered to be happening in edge cases, such as when a person is brain dead or prior to birth.
Those aren't 'spiritual' questions, though they can certainly be moral ones, and various religions definitely do weigh in. In my experience, the framing that this is ultimately a debate between religious/atheists is excluding many non-religious people who draw the line a lot closer to conception/implantation and have a moral objection to it that isn't informed by unknowable arguments like "God's will". And on the other side, plenty of religions do not weigh in on when during the pregnancy a 'soul' is there that we should care about.
That seems kind of at-odds with religious stories where God gives out commandments. For example, the Old Testament has a story where God carves "thou shalt not murder" onto a stone tablet to make sure people got the message, and this seems to imply that God wasn't willing to rely on conscience alone to communicate important moral principles.
Also--and I realize my previous comment perhaps didn't do a great job of getting at this, but--regardless of where the list came from...once you know it, shouldn't you be able to describe it?
If a person says we shouldn't do X -because- "that would be stealing" or "that would be murder" or "that would be adultery", then I normally expect they can give at least a rough description of what counts as "stealing" or "murder" or "adultery".
If someone says " you shouldn't do X, because that would be bligith," and I ask them to describe this "bligith" category, and the best they can do is say "search your conscience, you should have a definition in there somewhere (but I either won't or can't put it into words for you)" then I would be pretty unimpressed with their moral argument, and I suspect you would be too. (Notice that even if I -do- have such a definition in my conscience, I still need to somehow learn the mapping between conscience-objects and the verbal labels that they are using to refer to them.)
I've seen a number of instances where someone has claimed that some specific action is bad because it is "playing God", but I can't recall anyone ever making a serious attempt to describe the boundaries of what does and doesn't fall into this "playing God" category, the way we do for "stealing" or "murder". Have you seen any such attempt (that you'd put stock in)?
As a religious person, it always makes me cringe when other religious people make the argument that atheists can only be moral insofar as they stole that from religion. Please note that not all religious people feel this way, and that when you hear those arguments, you're hearing from the fringe and not the silent majority. I'm not cringing because I think it's not tactful. I'm cringing because it's not true.
I consider all the arguments that "atheists don't have morals apart from religion" to be spurious and uninformed. There is plenty of historical evidence that atheist/secular groups develop strong moral/ethical principles, including principles that have later been adopted as 'obviously correct' by religious people today. It's simply not true that atheists are amoral, nor is it true that moral development comes strictly from religion.
I challenge you to find a religious person who accepts what you wrote as matching what they believe. If you can't, I submit you have been misled by an extreme viewpoint into accidentally arguing the other extreme.
Maybe if you believe in a Calvinist God. I think most religions would hold that our sins as such are not willed by God, although He may will things that necessarily require allowing us to choose to sin.
Yeah, I completely disagree with you on this. If there is a god, and ergo we have free will, and ergo there is a fixed concept of right and wrong, then clearly I can choose to do wrong. The difference is that I can recognize the wrong that I've done (because I can measure it against a fixed moral point, ie. god). If there is no god, you can't even define wrong, and as such, you can do none of it, and recognize none of it.
In reality if I am asked to identify a personal moral framework it is do no harm, restricted to humans (personally defined as having been born, mainly because otherwise this allows people an excuse to do harm to pregnant women) and with an understanding that doing harm lessens the restrictions on others to do harm to you. I'm not sure I need to define a moral basis for that, insofar as I am aware I am human and so are others. I find asking for a moral justification for treating others well to be a peculiar thing: do I need to philosophise about why I always greet my neighbours, who are all pleasant people?
If you'll allow a whimsical counterpoint: do I need to justify every time I philosophize about deeper motivations? If I seek to understand the inner workings of the cell, nobody questions my desire to understand the world around me. Perhaps I can put my discoveries to good use.
Why should it be any different if I'm seeking to understand the inner workings of my own motivations? Perhaps I will be able to put the insights to good use. If your stipulation is that I shouldn't require you to participate, I'd absolutely agree with you.
But doing no harm to other humans is pretty much impossible! You need to add something about reasonable harm compared to what you gain, and even then the balance is really difficult.
I have no idea where the "God's will" arguments come from. I've never understood how people can make them in good faith. My suspicion is that they're a bad-faith attempt to 'win' an argument by cheating. It implies that the invoker of the argument somehow knows God's will in every minute circumstance. Else, how would they know when a human action is in accordance with God's will vs. opposed to it?
For example, was it God's will that humanity discovered birth control? What about Plan B? "No, that was man's doing, so its use is off-limits." Okay, then to be consistent it was man's doing that we discovered chemotherapy, antibiotics, and aspirin! But they're not going to let grandma die because it's "God's will" that she not get chemotherapy. And I doubt most religious people would cede that ground and accept that all medical breakthroughs are divorced from divine inspiration. But then when can you say that one breakthrough is "God's will" versus another that's not? You'd need divine inspiration. Are these people claiming a prophetic mantle? I don't like Kool-Aid, thanks.
As you can tell, I'm having a hard time giving the "God's will" argument a fair hearing, which suggests I don't understand it as well as the people who make that argument. (I know it's not the argument you're making, so much as invoking against what I said. I don't expect you to defend it. Knowing I can't makes me worried I don't understand it at all.) I'm just trying to figure out how anyone can make that argument in good faith, and not as an isolated demand for rigor.
Maybe they'd say it's okay to save grandma's life with technology, because you can thwart God's will to prevent death, but not to end life? How would they come to that conclusion, though? Is it buried in the begats somewhere, or is it just post-hoc rationalization that supports their position, so they're going with it? If so, why should anyone be required to accept it?
As someone who routinely defers to the Will of God, I'll try to shed some light on how I view that line of thought.
We can't defeat God's Will, no matter how we might try, but he obviously doesn't stop all things that are outside of His Will (i.e. sin exists and we know God doesn't like it). God gives us freedom to choose between right and wrong. God's Will is also not specifically known to us, so we can't follow it like a blueprint for all situations.
Instead, following God's Will is about aligning our priorities and purpose towards God. Rather than consider a situation in how it makes us wealthier or fulfills some hedonistic purpose, we consider how well we're oriented towards what God would have us do, as recounted in his Word (the Bible). So, something as core as "Love your neighbor as yourself" should be incorporated into how we go through life. That alone doesn't tell us whether we should support something or be against it - we could love our neighbor by offering government welfare or that could be something that slowly destroys their lives by breaking down society (to give a common debated topic). To me, either one of those could be examples of living out God's Will, if the person making the choice is considering what God would want out of that choice, instead of what they themselves want. If I don't like welfare because I don't like taxes, that's me thinking from selfish reasons, even if I tell people it's because of something more noble. If I truly don't like welfare for noble reasons out of a desire to help people and therefore serve God, then that would be seeking God's Will instead.
You're probably going to complain that such a viewpoint would allow people to do anything they want, and I would agree. The same is true for any philosophy that's followed falsely or hypocritically. This is also known to Christians. Here's Jesus in Matthew 7:21-23 - 21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
So, if Grandma is sick and chemotherapy would help, most Christians look at that and say "God's Will [based on my understanding of scripture] is for us to help her get better." But if Grandma dies, either before treatment or for lack of treatment, we don't look at that as the worst possible outcome. Death isn't the end, so we don't (or try not to) fear death as some ultimate evil or ultimate end. Similarly, we don't or shouldn't fear pain, economic hardship, etc. the way we would if those were the highest priorities. God's Will does not prioritize what might normally be considered the highest order purposes of non-believers, such as wealth or even good health. Often wealth leads to miserable situations for all people involved, which is something that following God helps us to see is a facet of reality. It turns out winning the lottery is a strong net negative for most people who do. Many rich celebrities have miserable personal lives and unhappy families.
With all of that in mind, we shouldn't look at a disabled child as the worst possible outcome either. If our purpose is to follow God's Will, then that means our purpose is not (directly, at least) trying to maximize GDP or reduce stress or whatever other reason people might give for destroying an unproductive or counterproductive human life (as in, a life that takes more resources to maintain and doesn't repay society through taxes). Despite being pro-life, I'm sympathetic to a couple that would want to save their future child years of pain and early death. I'm far less sympathetic to a couple who don't want the extra work or the interruption to their life plans that such a child would represent. Something along the lines of "We planned to travel the world, so we can't have a child with [specific disability]." I'm not planning to stop people from getting abortions, especially if it's their reasoned and selfish desire to avoid what they don't want to deal with. Those people aren't concerned about God's Will either way.
I'll be honest, I don't think you've articulated "God's will" in the way we're talking about as a command against intervention. I respect your position, and think it's totally fine. I just think maybe you don't hold the position I'm asking for justification of - which is a much stronger position to be in! The position I'm asking for justification of is, "If conception happens, it's God's will and any interference by preventing implantation or birth is therefore prohibited."
The bit that worries me here, particularly in relation to your first paragraph, is that the idea that God allows the creation of things that are not his Will is akin to a diluted form of dualism, wherein material things can be created by an agency other than God. At the minimum it's a return to pre-Christian positions where man and God can both create reality. But it allows the insinuation of a negative deity into the story, a creator of bad things (the "Devil's work"). If God's Will was that existence exists, and this was his work alone, how can anything that exists not be God's Will? I'mHumans have free will (thanks Augustine...) but I don't think that extends to the power to create, so everything that exists has to exist because it is God's Will. Which means the issue is not whether something exists due to God's Will, because of course it does, but whether God wished us to use it. I would argue that becomes an individual matters of faith but many seem to feel that they are justified in setting rules on the assumption if God's Will, seemingly because they can take it on themselves to judge how the relationship between God and others should proceed.
N.b. it's this sort of absolutism and denial of chance that makes me a theist rather than religious. I may therefore have a strong bias...
Here's one: human life is sacred, regardless of the circumstances of that particular life. IE, human life is sacred regardless of intelligence, race, gender, prestige, political power, wealth, physical abilities, etc. Sacred means to set apart and treat differently from others of it's class: out of all animals, humans are the sacred one. BBQ the corpse of a pig and you're fine, BBQ a human corpse and you're a cannibal and have desecrated a corpse. We treat humans differently. Kill a man's pig and your only crime is destruction of property: kill a man's child and you are a murderer. And if you murder, then society may kill you because you have violated the most sacred taboo and no other punishment meets the severity of that crime.
An embryo is a very early stage of human development, much like the baby stage, the toddler stage, the adult stage, and the geriatric stage. It is a human life, and all human life is sacred. Therefore, we must not kill embryonic humans.
Naturally you can disagree that human life is sacred, but this argument has nothing to do with the soul. It's not unique to myself either, this is essentially why the whole Catholic Church is opposed to abortion.
But for this argument to be valid one has to accept that the embryo stage is an actual human life (as opposed to a potential human life). That's plainly open to debate, since all the other stages you discuss are united by being separate organisms that are not dependent on any one human for survival whilst an embryo is totally dependent on one particular human (female)band is therefore a very different state of existence. That degree of dependency can reasonably be taken as an indication that an embryo is not actually alive in the same way as a babym
As you can see, I'm not buying the.logic applied by the Catholic church. After all, the pig it is acceptable to kill is clearly much more an independent living organism than the embryo. Potential to be a person does not mean an embryo will become a person, and I think the attempt to extend personhood to an embryo is unacceptable because it interferes with the bodily autonomy of an actual person, the mother (and, as someone who has had a round of IVF fail, until someone builds an artificial womb, embryos not implanted are certainly not potential humans anyway, merely potential potential persons).
Whether an embryonic human is a human is a biological question, and it is not controversial in the field of biology.* It is not potentially alive: it is alive. It is not potentially a human: it is a member of the species H. Sapiens. This is what H. Sapiens looks like at the embryonic stage of development.
Whether an organism is dependent on another organism for survival has no bearing on whether it is alive or whether it is an individual member of a particular species. Though I will note that humans are dependent on other humans for survival at many stages of development, including the newborn stage, the infant stage, and the geriatric stage. You don't stop being a human because you can't take care of yourself anymore.
*some receipts:
The Encyclopedia Britannica says the following: "The zygote represents the first stage in the development of a genetically unique organism."
The textbook Concepts of Biology states that "The development of multi-cellular organisms begins from a single-celled zygote, which undergoes rapid cell division to form the blastula." As does the textbook The Developing Human which states "Human development is a continuous process that begins when an oocyte (ovum) from a female is fertilized by a sperm (spermatozoon) from a male to form a single-celled zygote." Human Biology states that "The germinal stage of development is the first and shortest of the stages of the human lifespan. The germinal stage lasts a total of eight to nine days. It begins in a Fallopian tube when an ovum is fertilized by a sperm to form a zygote (day 0)."
Columbia University's online Human Development class resources defines a zygote as "a diploid cell resulting from fertilization of an ovum (mature female germ cell) by asperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being."
And here's a grab bag of cited quotes saying much the same thing.
"Embryo: An organism in the earliest stage of development; in a man, from the time of conception to the end of the second month in the uterus."
[Dox, Ida G. et al. The Harper Collins Illustrated Medical Dictionary. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, p. 146]
"The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."
[Langman, Jan. Medical Embryology. 3rd edition. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1975, p. 3]
"Zygote. This cell, formed by the union of an ovum and a sperm (Gr. zyg tos, yoked together), represents the beginning of a human being. The common expression 'fertilized ovum' refers to the zygote."
[Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N. Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects. 4th edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1993, p. 1]
"Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed"
[O'Rahilly, Ronan and Muller, Fabiola. Human Embryology & Teratology. 2nd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996, pp. 8, 29. (p. 12}]
"Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)... The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual."
[Carlson, Bruce M. Patten's Foundations of Embryology. 6th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, p. 3]
If you can find a biologist claiming that an embryo is not human, let me know.
In the good old days before the industrial revolution, population growth was limited by the horsemen plague, war and famine.
While God picks the victims for plague and war, for starvation, parents can allocate the resources among the family. Given the high infant mortality and the need for people able to work in the fields, the competitive strategy was likely to feed first the adults, then the older children and let the babies and sickly kids starve first. In any case, the parents were forced to "play God".
Furthermore, one could claim that the parents were at least negligent in not limiting their family size -- after all, the church was never shy about telling people not to have sex. However, for married couples, having as many kids as nature allowed was seen as desirable (which makes perfect evolutionary sense, but also indicated a reckless disregard for them dying of starvation).
The analogy is not perfect, the starvation risk is statistical, while the the pigeon hole principle will make certain that some embryos will die. And embryos are of course quite different from three year olds.
I think IVF (just like stem cell research) is just a stray casualty in the abortion war, which is part of a larger culture war on non-procreative sex.
i think schizophrenia and autism, two highly heritable conditions, are going to be targeted first by polygenic selection (OK, real talk, thre are ppl who have already done this...)
Scam. Polygenic prediction couldn’t predict schizophrenia. If the embryo is male and you predict it’s schizophrenia just based on that, that’s twice as good a predictor as polygenic score was. Just a grift and nothing more. Behavioral genetics is a null field. It’s scandalous that this fantasy continues. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wgjph
I’ve read most of the paper, and eventually gave it up as an utter waste of time. Author cannot straightforwardly deny heritability, so instead he’ll gesture at a reason why it might be biased, and leave things at that. It’s dril’s “drunk driving may kill people, but it also let’s people get to work on time, so who’s to say whether it’s a good or bad thing” blown up to paper size.
When we have cheap tech that can make site specific edits do you see the ethics around this changing? For instance, in the extreme case, a Down syndrome zygote that can just have an extra chromosome yanked out before it has even cleaved?
I know that’s haram right now but actually hoping pro life side might come around to it for the specific use case above.
Wouldn't the effect be to push down the intelligence of those from the unselected-for-intelligence population compared to average? We can probably isolate genes for intelligence enough to produce above average children more, but I don't think we can guarantee geniuses (that's complex) so rather than producing a discrete population of highly-intelligent people you'll simply make the overall population a bit more intelligent on average.
Oh, no! The youth won’t culturally fit in with their parents’ generation! Lots of kids will be smarter than their parents! This has never happened before!!?
Not a geneticist, but my understanding is that the result at the population level would be boring: hardly any effect at all. Each particular gene for a polygenetic trait has a tiny effect. Most embryos with any given gene wouldn't be screened out, because it's not accompanied by all the other genes that collectively make it a bad thing to have.
A poker analogy: let's say you shuffle 10 decks of cards and throw out every hand that has four aces. When you're done, how many aces have you removed? Not many, because most hands will have fewer than four aces. It's not much of a filter.
Here's the way I see it. Say there's a million genes that either have a positive or negative effect. At first, they're equally likely to be either, and the total averages around zero. But it goes up or down by around a thousand. You could easily select just people with a thousand more good genes than bad genes. Then the next generation, you're selecting from those people. On average, the embryos will have the same net good genes as their parents, so around a thousand, but they still vary by a thousand, so now you can select embryos with a net two thousand good genes etc.
Sure, it's "not many" genes in that each generation you're only bringing it 0.1% closer to the optimum. But you're also bringing it up by a standard deviation or more each time, and pretty soon the average person has better genes than anyone in the first generation.
Though I guess that just means there'd be a slow and steady improvement until someone figures out how to change genes directly (which probably won't take that long), and then they'll blow it out of the water.
Polygenic selection seems like a great idea, but I do have a question on it (unrelated to this post, which is about an argument I find ridiculous).
If widespread polygenic selection leads to selecting embryos that match the comparatively few characteristics we think are good, isn't it quite possible to face unintended negative consequences from lack of genetic diversity? In a book I read, 'Seeing like a State', European foresters thought it was a great idea to replace wild forest with monoculture plantations of trees they thought were good, but in retrospect they didn't have a good enough understanding of forestry science and it turned out to be a mistake.
A lot of genes are apparently just 'bad', getting rid of mutational load shouldn't be similar to a monoculture.
If everyone decides to just become a Jewish Ashkenazi at a genetic level (as we're a very successful group) there will be issues.
I feel like it shouldn't be an issue when selecting for health, Iq, looks and a bit of height, but I don't know and strong selection might have created Tay-Sachs, so I'll defer to the experts
There have been surveys done that show that parents would choose agreeableness and extroversion once they can choose personalities genetically. that could have very weird effects on society.
I'll try to find it but I don't know if my google is that strong. It was more than a few years ago, probably linked from slatestarcodex or maybe marginalrevolution, and it was the survey was asked in the context of being able to genetically manipulate your kids (not just generally what would you prefer your kids to be like).
It gives me the ick too, but I'm guessing Scott (and a lot of very reasonable, compassionate people) would happily risk less genetic diversity if it meant irradicating a lot of our worst mental and physical illnesses. It feels like nazi science to me, but there is an argument that I'm speaking from the privilege of not suffering from or seeing anyone close to me suffer from something terrible that's caused by what is essentially a bad genetic roll of the dice.
Also, some people reduce the risk of having a disabled child by simply having fewer children. Either they do not have children at all, or they have one or two and then decide that they got lucky but should not push their luck any further.
(From certain perspective, this is a selection pressure against whatever traits make you more likely to know and care about the potential disabilities of your children.)
Nazi science is generally understood to be medical experiments on humans without their free consent. The connection between selection for health and nazi anything is, of course, eugenics. Eugenics has an understandably bad rep nowadays, and just saying that "the new eugenics is based on Science" doesn't help too much, because that's what the previous iteration also claimed.
Nazi science in the sense that its easy to imagine a world where the fact that technology exists to make a class of person who is healthier/taller/smarter/whatever means that anyone who is born without that technology or who is judged to have not made the best use of it gets stigmatized. Which might just be the result of me having seen too many movies/read too many science fiction novels, but it is really, REALLY, easy for me to imagine and it gives me an immediate sense of morals squeamishness.
More generally, I think there's a pro-libertarian argument for polygenic screening and other forms of genetic selection, in that you are actually getting "more" choice about what kinds of traits your child would have then you would otherwise have if it were left up to chance, but the objection is the same one you always run into in all libertarian arguments: people won't actually make choices based on what they want, or even what's best for society, but on whatever they think affords them the most short-term maximalist game under certain market conditions. As an analogy, I think you already have intelligent, athletic kids who are forced by their parents to participate in activities that pad their resumes for elite colleges than doing what they would like to do with their lives, and this would be that extended all the way down to their genes. So instead of getting any real diversity of choice, you end up with a race towards some BS conception of the optimal Harvard undergrad or what-have-you.
> a class of person who is healthier/taller/smarter/whatever
Then we are lucky that we live in a world where everyone is equally healthy, tall, and smart. Thus no one gets bullied at school for being different, and everyone can find a good job.
(Basically, the dystopian world is not so different from our own. The scary idea is that *someone else* is on the top.)
I mean take this to the extreme - the minimum standard to get into Harvard is now "6' 6" olympic-medaling von Neumann adonis." Why would this be a BAD thing???
The fact that future generations are going to be attractive globe-straddling colossi in all fields of endeavor is an *unmitigated good,* that we should happily pull out our eyeteeth to achieve.
You're telling me you would be *disappointed* if your kid was an attraxctive, olympic-medaling, von Neumann-level genius??
The only objection here is purely "sour grapes" and "I'm not rich right now, so MY grandkids would be at a disadvantage in ubermensch world!"
Think bigger than yourself, think at the "humanity" scale, this is an absolutely unmitigated good that can't happen fast enough.
The only road to regular people being able to make their kids attractive, athletic geniuses is via rich early adopters doing it first - there's LITERALLY no other way. And if you outlaw it in your country, they're going to go to Singapore or Thailand or Estonia or wherever and get it done anyways, that's what it MEANS to be rich.
The problem with eugenics is that even from the start, and before the Nazis, there were a ton of assumptions around what constituted "health".
Eugenicists were fond of using the analogy of animal breeding, and applying it to humans. Sir Francis Galton is the 'father' of eugenics; you tell me, Himaldr, what constitutes "manliness" and how we select for it?
"A considerable list of qualities can easily be compiled that nearly everyone except "cranks" would take into account when picking out the best specimens of his class. It would include health, energy, ability, manliness, and courteous disposition. Recollect that the natural differences between dogs are highly marked in all these respects., and that men are quite as variable by nature as other animals of like species. Special aptitudes would be assessed highly by those who possessed them, as the artistic faculties by artists, fearlessness of inquiry and veracity by scientists, religious absorption by mystics, and so on. There would be self-sacrificers, self-tormentors, and other exceptional idealists; but the representatives of these would be better members of a community than the body of their electors. They would have more of those qualities that are needed in a state--more vigor, more ability, and more consistency of purpose. The community might be trusted to refuse representatives of criminals, and of others whom it rates as undesirable.
Let us for a moment suppose that the practice of eugenics should hereafter raise the average quality of our nation to that of its better moiety at the present day, and consider the gain. The general tone of domestic, social, and political life would be higher. The race as a whole would be less foolish, less frivolous, less excitable, and politically more provident than now. Its demagogues who "played to the gallery" would play to a more sensible gallery than at present. We should be better fitted to fulfil our vast imperial opportunities. Lastly, men of an order of ability which is now very rare would become more frequent, because, the level out of which they rose would itself have risen."
Don't forget the vast imperial opportunities! At that time the British Empire was, if not quite in its heyday, just past its zenith. Where is the Empire today?
"Systematic collection of facts showing the circumstances under which large and thriving families have most frequently originated; in other words, the conditions of eugenics. The definition of a thriving family, that will pass muster for the moment at least, is one in which the children have gained distinctly superior positions to those who were their classmates in early life. Families may be considered "large" that contain not less than three adult male children. It would be no great burden to a society including many members who had eugenics at heart, to initiate and to preserve a large collection of such records for the use of statistical students. The committee charged with the task would have to consider very carefully the form of their circular and the persons intrusted to distribute it. They should ask only for as much useful information as could be easily, and would be readily, supplied by any member of the family appealed to. The point to be ascertained is the status of the two parents at the time of their marriage, whence its more or less eugenic character might have been predicted, if the larger knowledge that we now hope to obtain had then existed. Some account would be wanted of their race, profession, and residence; also of their own respective parentages, and of their brothers and sisters. Finally the reasons would be required, why the children deserved to be entitled a "thriving" family. This manuscript collection might hereafter develop into a "golden book" of thriving families. The Chinese, whose customs have often much sound sense, make their honors retrospective. We might learn from them to show that respect to the parents of noteworthy children which the contributors of such valuable assets to the national wealth richly deserve. The act of systematically collecting records of thriving families would have the further advantage of familiarizing the public with the fact that eugenics had at length become a subject of serious scientific study by an energetic society."
Do you have at least two male siblings, and have all of your family gained distinctly superior positions to your classmates? Otherwise, sorry, you must be marked down as "not suitable to be permitted to reproduce"!
I don't think there would be meaningfully less genetic diversity. If you mean something like "percent of sites which differ in two randomly selected people", I think a bunch of generations of polygenic selection would decrease this by less than 0.1%.
Polygenics says a few specific genes at a few specific sites are good for height or eyesight or heart disease or whatnot, and they are extensively selected for. Then 20 or 40 years later, it turns out that these genes also happen to come bundled with other genes that have some specific issue, especially one that turns out to be magnified by coming from both parents. (I have essentially zero knowledge of genetics but I think that genes on the same chromosome can be linked like that?)
Polygenic selection has thus magnified the prevalence of a genetic structure that superficially seemed like a good idea, but turns out to have come with issues we just aren't aware of now.
I don't think there would be meaningfully less genetic diversity. If you mean something like "percent of sites which differ in two randomly selected people", I think a bunch of generations of polygenic selection would decrease this by less than 0.1%. Someone who knows more statistical genetics can tell me if I'm right.
- Most people will be selecting against various diseases. This will select out the genes involved in the disease, but not decrease genetic diversity in any other way. So it would be more reasonable to worry if the genes involved in certain diseases are good in other ways. This is true for some diseases (sickle cell anemia) but probably false for others (de novo mutations). I would hope this science would be used in determining what conditions and genes to select against.
- Most people will be selecting against different diseases, so there won't even be strong selection against any particular disease genes. That is, maybe 1/10 people select against schizophrenia, and the other 9/10 are selecting against other things (diabetes, heart attacks, etc). So at most 10% of people will be missing schizophrenia genes (and realistically each of these people will be missing different ones).
- Polygenic selection isn't very strong. You can essentially imagine it as having 5-10 hypothetical kids and keeping the healthiest one. If we picked the healthiest kid from each existing family and sent them all to another planet to reproduce, I don't think most people would describe that planet as lacking key genetic diversity.
- Realistically this would take dozens of generations of a substantial portion of the world's population using polygenic selection to have much effect. Before dozens of generations are up, we'll know enough about genes to have better options available (or be extinct).
I would argue that now is the best time to be developing at least tentative Schelling Fences about what is or is not okay. If it turned out that doctors developed a way to always select against schizophrenia and it suddenly became cheap and easy, we need a better answer than "at most 10% of people will be missing schizophrenia genes" as our response. That's true now, with current technology. There's no reason to think it will hold for the future as this becomes more widespread, cheaper, and easier to do. It may become quite easy to screen for both heart disease and schizophrenia, making it unnecessary to choose between them.
If we care about selection effects and that's a real problem, we should address the problem.
If people only selected for "does not have this disease", I think the argument could stand. But you know it won't stay like that. Think of all the people in this comment section slavering at the notion of being able to select for intelligence (and height, and whatever else they think is a goodie).
People are going to want the right to select the concert pianist baby because Mom and I both love music and play instruments, or the sports star baby, or 'I've been short all my life and I hated it, I want my kid to be a minimum of six feet tall for a better quality of life', and since we've already given in on the right to select your future offspring based on better outcomes in life (no disease), you can't argue strongly against "no you can't have musically talented or tall kids for better outcomes in life".
"For, had the couple produced a child but not under contract, the timing and conditions of conception would then (very probably) have changed and any better off child the couple might then have produced would (very probably) have been a distinct child, nonidentical to the slave child (Kavka 1982, 100 n. 15). The slave child, in other words, has no better alternative than what he or she has in fact been given as a slave. Once we appreciate that fact, it becomes hard to see how what the couple has done harms, or makes things worse for, or is otherwise “bad for,” the child."
Uhhhh - they sold their child into slavery, and the new owner caused harm to the child? I think they're responsible for that. Otherwise, there's no harm done by me if I throw a bag over Kavka's head, imprison him in a cellar, demand ransom, and start cutting off fingers for every day I don't get it. If he's the version of Kavka that gets kidnapped and has fingers cut off that came into existence, he has no better alternative and therefore what I do is not doing harm to, or making things worse for, or is otherwise bad for him. If he didn't want to be kidnapped and have his fingers cut off, he should have made sure his mother got pregnant a month later and on Tuesday, not Wednesday.
You say: "But once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos based on some criterion, like low schizophrenia risk, doesn’t make this issue any worse."
The criterion in the schizophrenia case is selecting for non-schizophrenic genes, whereas in the other cases it was more or less random, with respect to genes. . In the schizophrenia case, it might help to eliminate the schizophrenia genes from the gene pool. But some people might still object to this. If they were able to select for alcoholic genes and eliminate those, some might argue that is bad because alcoholics might tend to be more creative than non alcoholic. (For example, a lot of writers are alcoholics.)
Or if you could select for gay genes, some might say we shouldn't be trying to eliminate gays.
But then that’s an argument about preventing the trait by any means: nutrition, whatever. The alcoholism position is a case against rehab and anti-alcoholism campaigns. It doesn’t bear on IVF per se.
It could be argued that some traits are a net benefit in moderation, but too bad in excess. If we figure out a way to detect them in embryos, and eliminate them from the society, we lose the moderate version, too. This will not happen if we merely provide the cure to the excessive version.
Depends on how the genes actually work (I have no idea).
If it is like "one gene = creative; two genes = schizophrenic", we can select embryos with one gene.
If it is like "one gene = moderate creativity + 30% chance of schizophrenia; two genes = high creativity + 70% chance of schizophrenia", this will be a more difficult choice.
But wasn't the argument in an earlier comment that by screening, we can make the genes go away? Get rid of schizophrenia by selecting for low-risk embryos and only implanting them?
Is there any actual evidence of correlation between creativity and alcoholism? I'm inclined to say no because the vast majority of alcoholics are unnoticed in the population so the perception is of the cases that hit rick bottom and the successful ones, which skews perceptions to make this about success or failure rather than just everyday existence.
Also to be considered: is there something in the creative lifestyle that makes alcoholism more likely, such as musicians and intense partying whilst away from the secure structures of home?
The schizophrenia complaint at the beginning has a much simpler rejoinder - by selecting any of the embryos, they are necessarily not selecting 9 others. In this framing, all possible selections, regardless of schizophrenia genes, have equal moral weight. (Whether one thinks this is a positive or moral weight is beside the point; the point is that they are all equal)
Hmm... I suspect that the analog to "on the basis of merit" is at least fuzzier and more heterogeneous in the embryo selection case. I guess that the closest analog is something like "preferences of well-informed parents" which I'd expect to have more variability than a company's "on the basis of merit", which mostly comes down to profitability. I'm still happy to see well-informed parents select embryos, but I think the arguments aren't wholly analogous.
The correct answer here is "no one", since it was never proven to be an effective practice in the first place.
Other than that, congratulations for rediscovering the arguments of the late-90ies "is-IVF-morally-okay" debate, followed closely by the somewhat less dumb early-2000s "is-PIGD-murder" debate. If you keep this up, we'll have an "eugenics-will-save-us-all" post in a few months, followed by a "are-we-the-bad-guys" realisation in late summer.
Pardon the sarcasm, but if you've dug yourself into a hole, stop digging. Every respectable medical and scientific society spoke out against this previously, and the data are not coming in to change that.
It was a real comment, not pedantry, so thanks for engaging! I think another natural parallel is abortion for the purpose of sex selection, which many people (including pro-choice people) find very off-putting but is very common globally. We certainly don't call it "preventing femaleness". Specific to IVF, some countries (Germany) knowing the sex of your IVF embryos is illegal to avoid sex selection via IVF.
Fwiw I do feel there is a spectrum, and that while selecting embryos to avoid conditions like "female baby" or "probably shorter than my other embryos" does seem immoral to me, I would never advise a woman to transfer an embryo with (say) Edwards syndrome. Schizophrenia is in between those two.
I agree that this is what changes people's intuition here. I suspect that selecting for/against traits feels *humanizing* in a way that changes the intuitive calculus for some people.
The more we can say " this embryo would be like this, have these traits, be this gender and this tall" and do on, the harder it is to mentally categorize as non-person. Which, to her clear, is a statement about some human moral intuitions, not one way or the other about actual morality.
We can just as well call it "preventing femaleness", I don't see why not. And it seems clear that "preventing schizophrenia" in such way is net good, while "preventing femaleness" is net bad.
I'm against sex selection, but I think the victim there is society (which has an unbalanced sex ratio), and not the unborn woman. I think it would be equally bad if you were creating the child ex nihilo (for example you had a bunch of sperm and could choose which one to use to fertilize the egg) and couples consistently selected for maleness. I also think it would be fine if for some reason half the couples in a country wanted sons and the other half wanted daughters and they both selected for the sex they wanted. It's only in the context of people disproportionately wanting sons that it becomes dangerous.
Seems like you're on some pretty shaky ground here.
1. What if the parents select for females because they think female babies are cuter? You've said you're against "personality" selection so I assume you'd be against this, even though there are plenty more people selecting for males using infanticide?
2. What if the parents claim "females live longer on average so by selecting a female we are giving our baby more QALYs"? Doesn't this now become a morally defensible (if not imperative) act?
3. What if the parents selecting for maleness make up an excuse like "We're preventing ovarian cancer"?
4. Wouldn't all the parents using IVF to prevent schizophrenia end up with only female embryos because maleness is the strongest single genetic predictor of schizophrenia?
Trying to pitch camp anywhere on the slippery slope toward eugenics makes for a position that's difficult to defend.
I'm not sure I understand your objections to my position above. I don't inherently care about any of these things. I think the government has a compelling interest to keep the sex ratio about equal so that people can have families and produce a new generation, plus because the two sexes tend to prefer different jobs and all the jobs need to be done. If there's sexual selection that doesn't affect this, I don't care about it. If there's sexual selection that does affect this, that's why I care about it, and why I think the government should override the general presumption in favor of letting people have healthier children (assuming a rationale like your #2) in this case.
Regarding 4, I don't think there's much evidence that men get schizophrenia more than women.
> plus because the two sexes tend to prefer different jobs and all the jobs need to be done
It seems unlikely that the optimal number of male-preferred and female-preferred jobs are split 50/50. If on the margin we need more men/women for jobs, should the government incentivize selecting that sex?
Ok, so are you saying "choosing your baby's sex" is a public good of limited quantity (like grazing in the commons) and the government will have to apportion it (e.g. by lottery or auction) whenever the required diversity starts to run out?
Does this apply also to other kinds of genetic diversity? Do you think it'd be practical to administer if IVF selection becomes super popular?
And where does this leave you on "personality" selection? Inherently immoral/icky? Or "fine a long as the scale isn't sufficient to endanger society"?
Eugenics: fine on an individual free-choice level, bad on a societally imposed level. Does this seem like common sense? Is it a strawman of Scott's position?
I don't have any problems with polygenic screening, except its easy to imagine it becomes so commonplace that people who were born without it who have easily screened problems are treated as mistakes and stigmatized. Which might just be the result of me having seen too many movies/read too many science fiction novels, but it is really, REALLY, easy for me to imagine and it gives me an immediate sense of morals squeamishness.
More generally, I think there's a pro-libertarian argument for polygenic screening and other forms of genetic selection, in that you are actually getting "more" choice about what kinds of traits your child would have then you would otherwise have if it were left up to chance, but the objection is the same one you always run into in all libertarian arguments: people won't actually make choices based on what they want, or even what's best for society, but on whatever they think affords them the most short-term maximalist game under certain market conditions. As an analogy, I think you already have intelligent, athletic kids who are forced by their parents to participate in activities that pad their resumes for elite colleges than doing what they would like to do with their lives, and this would be that extended all the way down to their genes. So instead of getting any real diversity of choice, you end up with a race towards some BS conception of the optimal Harvard undergrad or what-have-you.
My guess is that's too broad a question. Different people's feelings would obviously vary depending both on what you incentivizing for, and how you are incentivizing for it.
Is it just mood affiliation/fear of the slippery slope to eugenics? (a bullet I'm happy to bite: why would you not want to give your child the best genes possible, regardless of the historical connotation)
If you want your child to have the best possible genes, should you also use a sperm donor who's a Gigachad with three PhDs instead of your own sperm? Unless of course you're a Gigachad with three PhDs.
This could get entertaining if genetic engineering gets more powerful...
How does a prospective parent feel about swapping in _1_ chromosome pair from a tri-Ph.D. , to the gain of 10 IQ points - but being a 1/23rd cuckold? :-)
Resulting soap opera report split between a genetic journal and an educational policy journal? :-)
The Repository for Germinal Choice tried something like this. Though they were advertising using sperm of Nobel laureates, and they only had one. It would be nice if someone did that well, but it's hard enough to get enough sperm without having requirements like that.
A good question, however I think a fair number of people would not feel it to be "their" child at that point (not trying to suggest adopting isn't highly honorable)
People make the argument against polygenic selection because it forces them to think about the influence of genes on various life outcomes. This in turn forces them to acknowledge that not everyone is born equal. But acknowledging this will get you cancelled in certain circles, so you have to try and construct an informal taboo against anything connected to the subject.
As a firm "life begins at conception" pro-lifer, I think Scott conflates two questions in his discussion of our perspective. Namely, "Does polygenic screening cause additional harm?" and "Does polygenic screening prevent schizophrenia?"
It's fair (if horrifying) to say that if you're already killing 9 out of 10 embryonic human beings, there's no additional harm in making sure that you kill the ones with various undesirable conditions. But this doesn't translate into it being fair to say that this process "prevents schizophrenia". You're just killing the schizophrenics.
Suppose a Nazi death camp has a doctor assigned to select certain quota of Jews to be spared the gas chamber and put to work in a labor camp instead. And suppose he makes sure to pick the strongest and healthiest ones without conditions like schizophrenia. The Nazi doctor is not, strictly speaking, making the situation worse. But he's also not "preventing schizophrenia".
I generally agree, but the crux in this situation is that they created ten embryos knowing full well they can't use them, and given the choice, we definitely shouldn't send sailors out to sea if they don't have enough resources to make it back without some of them being eaten. If you're pro-life, then IVF with polygenetic screening isn't worse than without, but you really should be more focused on preventing IVF in general than worrying about polygenetic screening.
As a biologist I'm perplexed how you guys can keep worrying about the feelings of undifferentiated cells. I have a lot of cells that die every day; many of them could potentially divide and start a new being; my cactus plant has even more cells that have high chances of dividing and starting a new cactus, but die anyway. (And don't tell me that it's somehow different because these cells are usually not freshly fertilized zygotes (some of them are). Even my somatic cells are former zygotes, my mothers' genes complimented with my fathers', some of them might give rise to a new vegetative organism that we call tumour, others could be technically modified to turn back into stem cells and become a new human). We accept this because space is limited and we couldn't fit so many cacti, or feed so many humans or tumours, and also these cells don't have consciousness anyway (at least not the kind that we would recognise as consciousness). Worry about conscious beings, they are the ones that suffer. The unconscious cells that could start a being but don't will become relevant in some future universe where space on planets and hard drives isn't limiting any more.
A lot of pro-life people believe in souls. It raises the question of why God doesn't just let dead fetuses reincarnate, but he does lots of crazy stuff.
I'm not worried about the feelings of undifferentiated cells, I'm worried about the coarsening effect on human beings of living in a society where killing your offspring is once again normalised.
Let's worry about if shrimp have emotional lives, but aborting a human foetus is just dandy. Why not bring back public executions and gladiatorial games? After all, personhood is just a legal concept, and if we can decide to bestow it at an arbitrary point, we can decide to remove it at an arbitrary point. So you're a drug dealer, now you're no longer a human person, you're just a clump of cells - go out there and dance in your blood for the entertainment of us real humans!
For someone who is not a trans-humanist, every human being which is conceived is doomed to die. There is a real possibility of them suffering a lot before dying.
Of course, for a Christian, this should all be dwarfed by the possibility that their soul will go to hell where they would suffer for eternity.
Under these circumstances, I would say that if we argue if we agree that trying to conceive in vivo is ok and argue about IVF we are mostly haggling about the price.
I agree that if you assume the life/non-life barrier is a bright line and starts at conception, that's a reasonable way to think of it. If you place the barrier after that, or think it's more of a fuzzy Schelling fence, then I think it more naturally groups with fertilizing some eggs instead of others (in which case the fetal alcohol syndrome analogy applies). I think as a pro-lifer, you can escape the implications of the fetal alcohol analogy by saying the difference is that the FAS woman is killing her eggs (which aren't life) and the polygenic selection person is killing embryos (which are life).
I think if you had a bunch of unfertilized eggs, and could choose which one to fertilize, and you chose one with low schizophrenia risk, you would consider that "preventing schizophrenia" (am I right?) If you're pro-choice and don't draw a strong unfertilized egg/fertilized egg distinction, then I think you should think of these two situations similarly.
Yes I think that if you were choosing which eggs to fertilize that would be fair to describe as "preventing schizophrenia". And I accept that if you don't take a strict conception line perspective, the polygenic screening scenario can be described in the same way.
If you wanted to be even more pedantic you could make the argument that the schizophrenic embryo has not actually developed schizophrenia yet (even if we know it will) and so destroying it does in fact prevent schizophrenia even from a pro life point of view. In the same literal sense prostate cancer can be prevented by executing men before they get old enough to develop it. But I don't think that's the sense you mean to communicate.
Why do you believe there's not a bright line between a fully formed (for its stage of development), developing human life and its precursors? Sperm and egg, without the other, are not a fully formed human life, and will not develop past their current state.
Being pedantic again, an embryo is an individual member of the species H. Sapiens. But I assume when you say "human" in this case you mean "human like us whose life has moral value, a person, etc."
One consideration I think this leaves out: it can be a heavier burden on both parents and children when parents are more the “authors” of their children through trait selection/abortion rather than the “receivers” of their child, open to uncertainty.
“The introduction of a choice reshapes the terrain on which we all stand. To opt out of testing is to become someone who chose to opt out. To test and end a pregnancy because of Down syndrome is to become someone who chose not to have a child with a disability. To test and continue the pregnancy after a Down syndrome diagnosis is to become someone who chose to have a child with a disability. Each choice puts you behind one demarcating line or another. There is no neutral ground, except perhaps in hoping that the test comes back negative and you never have to choose what’s next.”
That seems like a fully general argument against letting people make choices, though. Choices come with responsibility, and responsibility can be a burden, but taking away people's choices is rarely doing them a favor.
the ability to commit to not make a choice can actually be beneficial in really powerful ways, this is studied all the time in various models in economics. conversely giving someone the power to make a choice, can harm them, even if they do a great job of choosing.
only useful if there are other people playing against/competing with you, who will respond to your choices, but then again, there usually are.
Technically true but I think those situations are a lot rarer than you're making them sound. They're interesting because they're counterintuitive, and the intuition got to be what it is because it's usually correct.
That is an excellent point. In general, when the stakes are high, we try to pry the choice _out_ of Lady Luck's hand, and I think we are almost always wise to do so.
“The introduction of a choice reshapes the terrain on which we all stand. To opt out of doing something is to become someone who chose to opt out. To do something is to become someone who chose to do it. Each choice puts you behind one demarcating line or another. There is no neutral ground, except perhaps in hoping that there won’t be positive data indicating bad things so you never have to make decisions.”
I think this is a deep error that causes a lot of people immense distress. We only live in the present moment, your memory of the past and imagination of the future are also in the present. There is no difference in what you are between before and after a decision, you don’t become anything new.
This is an excellent point, and we should use this lens on choices more often.
We generally assume choice is an unmitigated good (with the single exception of choice paralysis from excessive amounts of choice), and this points out that choices have a real psychological cost
Agreed. This has far wider implications than just for polygenic selection or Down’s syndrome screening, though.
The more we learn about what affects the fetus and born baby, the more we are putting pressure on expectant mothers (and to a lesser degree, fathers).
The most trivial example is that most women I know will be very careful about what they put in their bodies when they are pregnant or breastfeeding. No smoking or alcohol are no-brainers. And they’re also happy to give up soft cheeses. And sushi. And hummus. And … Lots of things that pregnant women have eaten for centuries, because we now know they come with increased risk of harm to the fetus. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit with big harms avoided by easy sacrifices.
But as medicine and technology progresses, it gets trickier. Knowing that some harm is avoidable makes a huge difference. It is an unusual woman who will say that “I don’t care that this increases the risk that my child develops brain cancer by 25% – I’m eating it.” Or, to bring it back to schizophrenia via hypothetical example: “I don’t care if taking this pill will practically guarantee that my child won’t get schizophrenia. I’m not shelling out $80 for a single pill!”
And so the more we learn, and the easier preventing possible harm gets, the more we end up pressuring women and their partners to make easy choices and simple sacrifices, that may not be so easy and simple after all, when they’re all added up and technology and medicine have progressed another few clicks. I don’t think polygenic selection is the next virtually obligatory thing for expectant parents to do, but this particular slope is truly slippery (unlike most things called slippery slopes). As long as parents want what’s best for their children and science learns more about how to do that(?), it seems inevitable.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I agree that it’s a consideration we need to take seriously.
Can you save someone from a traffic accident? After all, the person you saved was by definition not a victim in the traffic accident. You merely preferred to go down the branch in which the person was unharmed rather than the world branch you would share with the traffic accident victim, you terrible ableist.
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I think conscious beings should get special treatment here. Their preferences regarding if and how they would continue to exist should be respected (within reason). They should not be euthanized and replaced with other conscious beings, unless that is what they want. Thus we do not have to debate if healing a mental or physical illness will just replace an ill person with a healthier (plus or minus scare quotes) one, simply follow the patient's preference.
(There might be some exemptions for young children and psychiatric patients reduced to the cognitive capabilities of young children. Basically, they get to have preferences, but sometimes their preferences may be overridden because of their cognitive limitations.)
So saving the traffic victim is the right choice, because presumably that is what their preferences are. By contrast, plants, insects and embryos do not get that protection, they are morally interchangeable. (At least until you add time travel, traveling into the past and preventing your enemy from being conceived by gifting their parents two tickets for the opera is probably evil.)
> But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term... But once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos based on some criterion, like low schizophrenia risk, doesn’t make this issue any worse.
I think that depends on for what reason one chooses to do the IVF. If the purpose of the IVF is to solely select embryos based on some (whatever) criterion (e.g. eliminate schizophrenia), then polygenic selection in this case inherit the moral argument against IVF as well hence the anti-abortionist do have a case here.
I think the strongest objection may be from people who are, not necessarily anti-abortion or anti-IVF, but pro-schizophrenia. When I asked my schizophrenic friend what he thought about this situation he said, "I think we're doomed as a society if people start doing that."
His argument is essentially (a) that schizophrenic people have access to perspectives and abilities that others don't have and that those things are valuable, and (b) that society is narrowing down so that only a very narrow set of characteristics can actually thrive in it, and that THAT is a bad thing, and this is both symptom and cause of the acceleration of that process. Schizophrenia outcomes are much better in societies that don't stigmatize it, so from the perspective of someone who sees value in being a way that not everybody is, I think the answer to who polygenic selection helps is "nobody, but it makes a lot of people think they've been helped, and that's a very bad thing."
I don't know if I agree with him or not overall but I have sympathy for that perspective. People without schizophrenia probably wouldn't have the same thoughts; in which case, it's exactly an example of the kind of perspective that schizophrenic people bring into society that others would not have access to without those people's existence. What do we lose when we select those people out on purpose? What if we don't even know?
I also grant that schizophrenia is a special case to him and by extension to me, by virtue of discussion - I have no idea what he'd think about fetal alcohol syndrome. I should ask...
He can't prove it. But he firmly believes that many of humanity's greatest advancements were likely made by people with uncanny pattern-matching abilities, weird thoughts, and willingness to take risks. He thinks schizophrenia itself is important for humanity. But the popular image of a schizophrenic person is a person who hasn't been able to deal with it. Someone who needs help and might be dangerous. So how would we even recognize the manifestations of other patterns of the same thing? We certainly (as a society) incentivize hiding it.
I wonder if the genes with Schizophrenia potential - sorry not my field you know what I mean - are also the ones that create highly creative people? This would be like the fertile sister theory of gay men.
However, what was the experience of his parents raising him? Can they expect grandchildren?
I've known more than a couple people with schizophrenia.
It is, on average, something that makes them much less likely to contribute anything important; it's *really* detrimental, in every case I've witnessed. Their ideas are more along the lines of "wearing red clothes means your allegiance is to Satan" than "hold on, what if we just used THIS pattern but applied it HERE and... [scenes from that movie about Nash]?!"
If your friend is successful or even some sort of mad genius, I think it's almost certainly moreso *despite* the schizophrenia than *because* of it.
(FWIW, my oldest friend with schizophrenia just posted on Facebook again about how much he hates the way he was born and wishes he could be cured; they seem pretty miserable, too, mostly.)
Ah. I came back to say I've been listening to Roy Plomin (who wrote "Blueprint"). It looks as if the evidence points to the risk of schizophrenia being tied to the Openness trait, i.e. the creativity and openness to experience your friend reports.
Plomin says he himself is in the 80th percentile for risk (not the same as 80% risk, as far as I can make out) and that this is true of a lot of creative people.
So I think your friend is right but in the wrong direction. The true seems to be something like: "The price of having creative people in our society is having to accommodate a small number of schizophrenics. Those schizophrenics who are functional are likely to be very creative, but not all very creative people are schizophrenics. "
A counter-argument to your friend would be that schizophrenics have really high suicide rates (attempt:s 18-55%, successful suicides: modal 10%, I just googled it). Your friend is probably unusual, generally they would prefer no schizophrenia.
> society is narrowing down so that only a very narrow set of characteristics can actually thrive in it
Actually, in high-income societies it's almost definitely the other way around biologically speaking; the brutal force of natural selection is softened and people with many health problems are helped to live a reproductive life if they want and find a partner. Natural selection nowadays favors the reproduction in lower societal tiers, where various health and mental problems are more widespread (with some exceptions). Is it then a very good thing for the society? It... doesn't sound so, but you never know.
I think one thing that your counterpoint misses is that those suicide rates need to be evaluated in context: for every ten schizophrenic people in the population, how many are known to be schizophrenic? We have no idea. Most of the highest functioning ones probably don't tell anybody or only tell family and friends. Those would be the ones that figure out how to use the benefits to their advantage or at least deal with the downsides. The ones who go seeking help obviously would prefer no schizophrenia, but that's the definition of a selection bias. And on the other hand, how many are medicated? My friend's opinion (and it really is a friend, not me, I have no actual personal experience with this) is that the side effects of the medication that is available are bad enough on their own to make someone suicidal. My friend certainly falls into the "nobody would know if he didn't tell them, they'd just think he was a unique person" category.
Furthermore, it doesn't sound like you're actually saying that society is allowing those people to thrive. Just to reproduce. But I'm talking about thriving. Schizophrenic people are much less likely to want to die if they're born into a society that respects their challenges and gifts. Historically that's "he can talk to spirits" or whatever. That guy might be revered. As soon as it's a pathology to be medicated away or shunned from society that is when the bad parts come in. Including the internal ones. I'll have to see if I can find a link but from what I've read, in the aforementioned societies where schizophrenia is considered communication from spirits or ancestors or gods or whatever, those communications don't tend to get violent or self-loathing. It wouldn't actually require ancestor-worship to not denigrate schizophrenics though. How bad an experience schizophrenia is in our society seems to be largely on us.
The suicide rate is about half that. There are two big predictors of suicide in SZ:
1. Depression. This is the same big suicide predictor as for everyone else. Depression is relatively common 1. in the immediate post-psychotic period, and 2. for the same reasons other people would be depressed in a given set of circumstances, like if they're unemployed and live with their parents.
2. "Insight", i.e. believing you're sick. This is a huge risk predictor, which a lot of people step uncomfortably around, because it doesn't match what people really want to be true (that "insight" is an uncomplicatedly good thing). If you've accepted that you "have schizophrenia", and the things that people tell you are true based on this, you tend to be in a pretty bad state. If you reject at least part of this (and have less than perfect "insight"), you tend to have more hope.
The big suicide scenario in SZ is a young person who recently had a first psychotic episode, is "stabilized", and has good "insight". They genuinely believe the narrative that's been presented to them -- that they have a severe chronic illness, that things are going to constantly degenerate from here, that they need to take drugs with unlivable side effects for the rest of their life, that their future is extremely bleak, that they will never hold a job, that they will never marry, etc. A hell of a lot of people would commit suicide under those circumstances. The biggest tragedy of all is that this isn't true.
It... it seems pretty true to me, man. As I mentioned above, I have had two close friends with schizophrenia and two other sort-of-friends, and... all four conform to the final paragraph there real well.
Well, one got married (later divorced) and one is able to hold a job. But overall, it doesn't look good, and 3/4 really seem to wish they weren't schizophrenic. One is happy with it — the only female of the four — but looking at her life, which is filled with trials and tribulations she's brought on herself by making insane choices...
...well, I guess she can be the judge, but I wouldn't want it for myself or anyone I loved.
1. The idea that schizophrenia is neurodegenerative, in the Kraepelinian "dementia praecox" sense, is supported by absolutely no evidence and abandoned by virtually all researchers. It remains common in clinical practice, because clinical practice often seems like an attempt at doing the worst things possible. It is, and has been for some time now, the kind of position where its supporters are apologists who write papers with titles like "Defending the neurodegeneration hypothesis of schizophrenia". This paper (open-access) reviews the death and metamorphosis of the neurodegeneration hypothesis in an accessible way; while it's getting up there in years a little, this is still the situation on the ground:
2. In the long run, few people who have a psychotic episode experience a long-term disabling chronic psychosis. The most common outcome of one psychotic episode is "functionally-full remission of psychosis, never has another". The most common 'worse' outcomes are things like "less than 100% remission" and "occasional flareups".
3. A substantial minority (across decades and every single treatment anyone's ever invented, consistently 30%) of people diagnosed with SZ experience full recovery, with complete remission of symptoms and exactly the same socio-occupational functioning they 'should' have. Another chunk of people have functional but not symptomatic recovery (#2 without #1). Many more people are somewhere on a spectrum towards one or both outcomes. This is actually quite a bit higher than the classically "worst prognosis" that gets represented to most people diagnosed with SZ (about 25%). As Zipursky et al. (2013) discuss in the first paper, this is mostly a "clinician's illusion" -- the image of SZ available to any given practitioner tends to represent the worst outcome, because people who partially or fully recover aren't seeing psychiatrists (and are often optimizing to *not* see psychiatrists).
4. People who recover, partially or wholly, are regularly off medication. Starzer et al. (2023), the second paper, is reasonably representative for follow-ups over its time horizon. Just over half of the best-prognosis and second-best-prognosis positive symptom groups were off medication at 20 years. *Two-thirds* of the best-prognosis negative symptom group was off medication at 20 years, which is pretty remarkable, because it's hard to ascribe a selection effect to that -- the correlation between positive and negative symptom severity was weak and nonsignificant (this is more obvious in the supplementary materials), and neuroleptics have little beneficial effect on negative symptoms. It's unclear exactly when psychosis prognosis becomes "clearest" -- the number of follow-ups over this time horizon is small -- but most information we have implies these groups are generally people who've been off medication for quite a while by the 20-year mark.
This is all very mainstream stuff. I could say less mainstream things I think are supported by the literature, but none of this is that. I know what the truth here is, and I know what the Torrey types were trying to tell me the truth was when I was 16 and fit the FEP criteria and terrified of what was happening to me, and I know they're still telling that to families today. Things are getting better -- slowly -- for some people -- but it's a grievous injustice.
Yeah, I pretty much agree with this perspective (I am the exact textbook description of schizotypal personality disorder, do not fit SZ criteria, fit SZ criteria when I was 16). I think the neurotype and experiences I have are good, and want them to be more common in the general population. The evidence we have about how SZ develops and what components of it are genetic suggests "screening against SZ" would mostly be screening against schizotypal people.
I have another friend with schizotypal PD and he feels the same way. It's not easy! It sure could be easier though! Is humanity really better off getting rid of its weirder members? I don't think so but I'm not schizophrenic so it's easy for me to say. Much more weight coming from people with the experience being those people to back it up.
Surely there are forms of weirdness that are not even necessarily less weird than some forms of schizophrenia, but that don't come with so many negative side effects?
When some people feel a vague distaste to something new they sometimes make up a line of moralistic-sounding bullshit to make this distaste count in an argument. Arguing against pre-implantation embryo selection on the grounds that it does not help an individual is just that, and it is not grounded in legitimate moral reasoning. Scott completely demolished this argument but I'd like add another nail in the coffin:
An individual human is in part shaped but not wholly defined by his genes. We are spiritual beings first and foremost, defined by our memories, desires, social relationships and other indexical features that are created as the brain develops. An embryo is not a person, it is merely a molecular machine that runs a program to create the material vessel in which our spirit gradually grows. "Scott's first baby" is a person, nestled in his unique place in the world, with a unique relationship with his parents. Substituting another molecular machine before Scott's baby was delivered into his unique place would not make it another person. It would be still Scott's first baby, just with a different set of genes.
This way of thinking might feel counterintuitive at first but it actually flows directly from realizing that the individual human existence does not start with some arbitrary molecular event, like the formation of a zygote and a new diploid set of genes. Instead, the human individual grows into being gradually as a neural network that a bootstraps itself into consciousness, many months later. If you believe that this neural stage of development is the true beginning then changing genes at an earlier stage is no longer special, it has the same ontological status as all the other events that impact future humans, be it prenatal vitamins or alcohol abuse counseling of parents.
It is therefore right and proper that we give future individuals the best sets of genes we can, so they grow into more perfect beings.
I disagree quite strongly with this: "Substituting another molecular machine before Scott's baby was delivered into his unique place would not make it another person. It would be still Scott's first baby, just with a different set of genes."
It would be a different person, occupying the same role. "It would be still Scott's first baby" is only true in the same trivial sense that if a different person had won the latest US election "it would still be the 46th president".
If a fetus is aborted or miscarried and then the parents conceive again, is that "not a different person" from your POV? How about if a baby dies in infancy and then the parents have another baby?
How about if a baby is born and then gets swapped in the hospital, unknown to the parents? Is that "not another person, still $couple's first baby, just with a different set of genes"?
How about if Alice is married to Bob but is having an affair with Charles (and suppose Bob and Charles have noticeably different physical characteristics and personality traits). If Alice happens to get pregnant with Bob's baby versus Charles's baby, and either way Alice and Bob bring up the child as their first child, is it "the same person" regardless of whether it's biologically Bob's or Charles's?
The notions of personal identity and of identifying an individual always involve judgments about what is important and what is not. A baby with a little mole on his back is still the same baby. A baby that suffers massive brain damage becomes something else. "The same person" does not mean platonically perfectly identical, it just means "for our purposes not substantially different in the situation we are considering". Identity is not a binary choice, it's graded on a curve. Events that do not substantially change the way the baby and his family relate to each other do not change the child's social identity. The examples you provide mention events that most people care about (child abduction, adultery) which may completely change the relationships within the family. This is not relevant to parents making certain choices (using prenatal vitamins, or using pre-implantation genetic selection), which create somewhat altered versions of the same person or family, not completely different ones.
You seem to consider the value/identity of an individual wholly as an object, only as the sum of its value/identity in the eyes of others. That is to say, you are not considering a human being as a subjective individual which itself forms an identity from within, without the need for a specific environmental context (ie loving parents or whatever). That idea is in itself a de-humanizing one, you even de-humanize yourself with that idea (you could be anyone else, indifferently, if by chance a different sperm had fertilized your mother's egg). Every human being is a universe, replacing one with another in the same circumstances does not sum up to the same result.
Whether "humanness" begins at conception or slowly grows is actually an interesting question. I prefer to err on the side of caution and believe it begins at conception (a pretty clear line when we have a living thing with a full set of human DNA). Saying it slowly grows, leaves the door open to "abort" - how should we call them?- partially-human living things? until... when? 2-years old? 5-years old?...
I started answering your first paragraph but the longer I wrote the less I understood how what you wrote relates to my previous post. I have no idea how to answer your objections.
But, here is what I initially wrote, maybe it will shed more light on my ideas:
Nothing of what I wrote denies the subjective value of a person. Just as we make judgments about the identity of others, so does every one of us make judgments about his own identity. YMMV but I do not put any value on having a specific set of genes running the biochemistry of vessel in which I am currently contained. I value a specific collection of memories, desires and attitudes that collectively define me as opposed to other people. Whether this collection of mental objects is instantiated on this or that genome, or in a silicon chip, it doesn't matter.
Regarding your comments on the beginning of the existence of a person as an ethical subject:
Why is a "living thing with a full set of human DNA" something valuable? My pinky has millions of such living things, my skin sloughs off a billion of them every day. When you say that "humanness begins at conception" you are equating the ethical standing of a single cell with the ethical standing a child or an adult human. Can you treat a single cell as the ethical equivalent of a person? To me this his makes absolutely no sense at all.
I tried thinking really hard about this, then somehow ended up with "Should I be worried that I'm not myself, but actually my identical twin?", then decided to call it quits for the night.
I find questions of identity to be really difficult, philosophically. When I was younger — first posting on LessWrong with Yvain! Yvaine? I think it didn't have the e but I can never remember — I was sort of cocky about my ability to cut through philosophical quagmires; I spent a lot of time discussing and thinking about various "paradoxes" and questions, and I would say "I've never met a so-called 'paradox' I could not resolve to my satisfaction" ("😌").
Then I came upon the Ship of Theseus. Then I came upon the various corollaries and modern modifications involving teleporters and replacing parts of one's brain a bit at a time and AAAAAH—
I *still* have no goddamn idea where to draw the line, really.
We have a mental module that creates the feeling of being a separate entity, independent and somewhat opposed to other humans. You need the ability to separate your self from others to resist their attempts at controlling you and to reduce the passive bleed-over of thoughts and motivations from other minds, or else other, craftier minds will invade your goal system, subvert it to serve them, and eventually suck your dry of resources and life. This individual identity module does tend to glitch when confronted with some scenarios concocted by very crafty minds, like various uploading and teleportation schemes. I spent dozens of hours arguing about it on the extropian list during the periodic recurrences of the infamous "identity thread", and my way of thinking about the self became rather idiosyncratic. Here is what I tend write when the inspiration strikes:
I am a burning spark of heavenly fire, my consciousness gives sound to the falling tree, I make the sun shine the bright light instead of insensate photons. My thought moves matter and pushes ions in the brain, I am the master of my in-skull domain. I, Rafal, or us Rafals, one copy or a multitude, we mental twin brothers are all one, me. When I grow up I will be a robot, consciousness vast, multithreaded, more, more of me!
I think attacking any of this from the angle of where life begins and what can be constituted as "replacing one child with the other" is entirely the wrong model to think about this. All of this - fetal alcohol syndrome prevention, IVF, etc - *feels wrong* to some people because it's artificial, civilized, technological interference with a process of childbirth, which *feels* natural. It feels like it should be a beautiful and chaotic and unpredictable leap-of-faith process, and if you got a schizophrenic child, well, sucks ass, that's fate.
It's the same logic that drives the discussion about "GMO foods" and "would you like tomatoes with no genes and DNA in them".
(for the record, I do not espouse any of these views, but I'm confident people do)
"if you got a schizophrenic child, well, sucks ass, that's fate"
Maybe the question shouldn't be about how much it would suck if we "got" a schizophrenic child but rather whether the schizophrenic child him/herself would prefer to have been born or not? What would they say if you asked them? (this is not meant to be a rhetorical or facetious question, I honestly don't know what they would say - maybe the physchiatrists or psychologists here would know? Do people with these kind of problems wish they didn't exist?)
As I mention above, I have a couple close friends with schizophrenia, and another few sort-of friends who are schizophrenic as well; 3/4 often post on Facebook about "hating [their] disease/brain/self" and at least one attempted suicide.
One appears to be happy with her "uniqueness" (the only female of the four, and the only one who is holding a job).
Anecdotes don't make anecdata, I know; but I certainly have a strong impression that schizophrenia is pretty bad, from my interactions with these people.
But by having the one child, the parent is *not* having a different child in roughly the same period. Would the unconceived other child prefer to be born, or not? It's unknowable, of course, but the odds of them preferring not to have been born are probably much less than the odds of a schizophrenic person preferring that.
The big difference between polygenic selection and your three examples is that of expressing a very specific judgement. Example 3 involves no choice, examples 1 or 2 just say "I want my kid to turn out better rather than worse." But polygenic selection very specifically implies "schizophrenia sucks, my kid shouldn't have it". And I think that activates a strong anti-judging instinct in many people's heads.
Logically it is perfectly consistent to say "I'd prefer a world with no schizophrenic people, but the schizophrenic people that already exist should be treated with compassion and understanding". But thinking that is hard unless you're a super high-decoupler. For many people, hearing "my kid shouldn't have schizophrenia" subconsciously implies "I think schizophrenics are Evil" - and so they feel icky about it.
(Also, this strongly reminds me of the debate around selective abortion in cases of a prenatal Down Syndrome diagnosis. The feelings involved seem the same, even though no IVF is involved.)
As an extra prediction of this explanation: I bet that people would be much less morally conflicted about polygenic selection for resistance to seasonal influenza, because getting flu more or less often isn't an identity, and doesn't trigger the same kind of emotional interference.
“Logically it is perfectly consistent to say "I'd prefer a world with no schizophrenic people, but the schizophrenic people that already exist should be treated with compassion and understanding". But thinking that is hard unless you're a super high-decoupler.”
In the contrary I would wager this is the majority opinion. Most people understand that schizophrenia is bad and that people who suffer from it deserve compassion.
The point about high-decoupler vs low-decoupler is good. It seems to me that low-decouplers are in practice bullies, saying new humans should be born with a disease so that we don't hurt the feelings of current humans with the disease.
Aside: FAS is tricky. Dan Savage talked about this when he and his husband were adopting their son. They saw so many kids in the system had FAS or potential FAS, were terrified, looked into it...and saw the symptoms discussed by support groups prominently featured such examples as "child argues with parents about chores" and "teenager behaves impulsively". They quickly became much less worried about FAS.
There is very clearly a true, classical FAS. This is a bad thing, not having FAS is a good thing, etc. There is also a broad "fetal alcohol spectrum", which includes many people who do not have the classical FAS facies, but are thought to have the FAS behavioural phenotype. It's...nonobvious...that this should be thought of as the same thing as FAS. In the real world, and in particular in the foster system where FAS diagnosis is usually made, a large chunk of all FAS diagnosis is on this extended spectrum. (Diagnosis in particular systems is a generally tricky problem. Most 'closed circles' -- foster care, forensic psychiatry, memory recovery, etc. -- are prone to particular diagnoses at high rates, where the same diagnosis would not necessarily be made for the same person in a 'community' system. This colours our impressions of such diagnoses, and the data surrounding them.) People with traits associated with the "FAS behavioural phenotype" are both more likely to have kids with such traits and probably more likely to have kids in foster care.
A surprisingly large chunk of people with a clinical diagnosis of FAS turn out to have a CNV that likely explains their symptoms:
This should be read as a "hey, isn't this interesting", not as any particular direction of thing. It's interesting. I'm not sure what to make of it. Most people don't seem to be making anything of it at all.
Independent of any empirically-grounded distinction, I think that here at least part of the explanation is that "schizophrenic" is an identity while "FASer(?)" isn't.
/r/schizophrenia/ has 75,000 subscribers and /r/fasd/ has 650, while the "base rates" of having FASDs vs schizophrenia are comparable. In my personal life I've had a few people "come out" as schizophrenics but none as FASDs. And so the emotional reaction to "preventing FASD" vs "preventing schizophrenia" will be different.
(of course we could then ask _why_ FASD is less of an identity, and that's a very interesting question, but maybe not directly related to this post.)
Most of the arguments I've seen around Polygenic Selection center around second-order effects—they're slippery slope arguments, or Fence arguments, saying that if we start selecting against things that are debatably bad (like schizophrenia), then we're going to start selecting against things that are very clearly mixed (like mild autism), then we're going to see pressure to start selecting FOR things that are very clearly bad for the individual but good for society (like obedience to authority). How do you rate these second order effects?
I think this is an argument worth taking somewhat seriously, and I would like to hear what Scott and others think about it. Though I wonder whether the genes themselves would allow for such a slippery slope, or whether selection requires enough trade-offs that rational people will disagree on how much risk of Schizophrenia (or mild autism or disobedience) is acceptable.
e.g. If a 50% chance of increasing your child’s IQ by ten points comes with a 2% increase in risk/severity of autism, a lot of people would probably take it, but some might not. Then repeat with 25% vs 5% respectively. Some will still take it, but fewer. Then repeat with 15% vs 12%. Etc. Multiply by dozens of traits and hundreds of diseases and disabilities.
I don’t yet think we know nearly enough about the tradeoffs involved in picking and choosing our genes, but I suspect we will learn more, rapidly, once we start down this path.
Now, one of humanity’s most common and most harmful tendencies is to be incurious about, and stay ignorant about, the cost of tradeoffs, and instead optimize for some narrow good. (All species do it, but we’re in a unique position to see it and do something about it.) So I’m not sure I dare predict how this might play out, other than to say we have some unforeseen (but not entirely unforeseeable) consequences in our future.
Sure. My point isn’t about individuals though. I don’t care what any one person optimizes for. Natural selection solves for that. For species, the problem arises when entire populations optimizes too much for a narrow good. (Cheap energy provides many good examples.)
Edit, to be clear: The problem arises when virtually everyone makes the same tradeoffs (e.g.: collectively optimizing for having less schizophrenia in society, and losing creativity at the same time, to take an example from Scott’s last post), not when just a few people do it.
I have no moral or other objections to screening embryos for general embryo health, or for the chance that they will grow up to be schizophrenic; implanting the ones with the least risk of the relevant disease; and discarding the rest. But I don't think it's quite accurate to call what you're doing preventing schizophrenia.
Let's say somebody sets up a clinic in some lawless part of the world, where they will test a couple's baby for genes strongly associated with schizophrenia and euthanize the infants found to be at high risk. In this lawless place there are also many people willing to sell their newborns, so the clinic is also able to provide the couple with a new infant, certified to be low risk. Would we call that preventing schizophrenia? I don't think so, and I am really talking about linguistic matters here, not moral ones. Seems to me the normal way to describe what's happened is that a schizophrenic-to-be was denied a chance to grow up, because their growing up included the very unfortunate feature of their becoming schizophrenic. Discarding embryos with high risk would be described the same way.
Or here’s another thought experiment: Let’s say we euthanized all people at age 65. That would undoubtedly reduce the number of deaths from cancer, heart disease, etc. It would reduce the absolute number, but also the fraction of the population that dies of one of these diseases. But you wouldn’t describe that approach as preventing a bunch of deaths from cancer and heart disease, would you?
Maybe I haven’t fully grasped what the point of your argument is. But it seems to me like a sort of convoluted effort to find a non-inflammatory and in fact positive way of describing the process of discarding embryos with high genetic risk of growing up to be schizophrenics. I don’t think it is going to work to change any public attitudes. I think you have to fall back on saying that embryos are little more than packets of genetic info. They’re not alive, not conscious, not people. Consequently, it is sensible and not evil to discard the defective ones.
Yes, I understand that embryo selection doesn't reduce the number of births or deaths. (Actually, neither do the 2 instances of euthanasia in the thought experiments I describe. They just reduce lifespan of the euthanized.) But I don't see what bearing that has on my point, which is just that Scott's use of the term "prevent schizoprenia". seems like it's really straining the boundaries of what we generally mean by "prevent." It seems to me like an effort to make embryo selection more palatable to those who oppose it -- because nobody's going to object to preventing schizophrenia, right?, while many are going to object to “throwing away embryos” with lots of defective genes.
It also seems to me like tricks with words to say someone’s preventing their child from having schizophrenia. Normally what one would take that sentence to mean is that you are doing some medical or psychosocial intervention that would keep the person — not the embryo —at high genetic risk of schizophrenia from developing the illness. But what's really happening is that there are several embryos who could become your child, each of whom would be distinct and different child from all the others in its characteristics -- and you are choosing to allow one of these potential children, the one with the smallest chance of schizophrenia, to develop into a child and be born.
Here’s an analogy. Let’s say somebody I know is about to buy a 2024 yellow Prius, and I work for the company and happen to know that the yellow ones have a weird defect that makes them prone to blowing up at high speeds in hot weather. I tell my friend that on no account must he buy a yellow one — so he buys a blue one instead. The normal way to talk about this would not be to say that I prevented my friend’s next car from blowing up. It would be to say that I prevented my friend from buying a defective Prius that would have blown up. There were multiple possible next cars, and I prevented my friend from choosing the bad one. Likewise, the normal way to talk about embryo screening would not be to say that I, the genetic screener, prevented the couple’s next child from becoming schizophrenic. It would be to say that I prevented their choosing the embryo that would have developed into a schizophrenic.
>But I don't see what bearing that has on my point, which is just that Scott's use of the term "prevent schizoprenia". seems like it's really straining the boundaries of what we generally mean by "prevent."
I agree with your point. ( To an extent it depends on the granularity with which we observe the process. If we treat the whole fertility clinic as a black box, and say that it prevents delivering embryos recommended for implantation which are prone to schizophrenia, that would also be correct... )
It's not just the defective ones, though. Maybe 5 have higher risk for schizophrenia, but of the other 5, do we choose randomly, or do we perhaps select for intelligence or blondeness or something else?
How many times do I have to roll 6 3d6 in order, before I find a keeper?
Well, according to Scott there's a whole other dimension of embryo selection that has nothing to do with how desirable the genetic package it contains is, but involves assessing the health and normalcy of the embryo itself. So at this point what would really happen would be that any remaining selection would be determined by the health of the embryo itself. But in the future I'm sure we'll have the luxury of selecting for other traits too. Yeah, I suppose most people will select for tall, thin, (white, of course, that goes without saying), blond and smart. You know, an Aryan. Someone the American neo-nazi's would warm up to on sight. The California Cryo guy who was chosen by so many women that he had like 100 offspring was a tall blond philosophy major.
I can never get anyone to take any interest in my idea that it's important to select for empathy and low propensity for violence.
Wait, what's a collective action problem? You mean diffusion of responsibility -- like lots of people of agree, but nobody's making any effort to promote the idea? If so, I don't think that's what it is. I think many people here truly think the key to making the world better is having more smart people and fewer dumber ones, and that "niceness" (their mildly derogatory and somewhat inaccurate idea of what I'm talking about) is not very important. And some have actually said to me that if you go for hi IQ you capture hi empathy anyhow. No you don't. There's just a weak positive correlation. And then I get the sense that a lot of people think I'm being sort of woke -- like everybody gets to win prizes here, and if we have prizes for IQ, we should also have one for Niceness, and for being good at baking cakes, and for being able to run fast, everybody's brilliant at something kind of thing.
NO, that's not where I'm coming from. I really think a 10% increase in the number of gentle and highly empathic people in Israel and Palestine would have made the last year there much less awful. I think making the leaders there 10% more gentle and empathic would help more than making them all 10% smarter.
If you insisted to me that the 'kill all 65 year olds' approach was preventing a bunch of deaths from cancer and heart disease, I don't think I'd disagree though. So your intuitions about language here may not be such a home run.
Well, I'm not convinced my intuitions are a home run, just feel more that the way Scott's talking is an odd use of 'prevent.' It's not *wrong,* exactly -- you see what he means -- just an odd use of the word. In this case of this piece, it seems like an odd use of the word 'prevent' whose purpose is to make discarding embryos with a lot of bad genes more palatable. His use is 'prevent' is maybe sort of comparable to someone's calling SSRI's a birth control drug, because they often cause sexual dysfunction. It's not not *wrong* exactly. It's quite possible that fertility rates are lower for people with that SSRI side effect. But it's a nonstandard, maybe sort of playful use of the term 'birth control.' The listener might think of it as the speaker joking around a bit as he makes his complaint about the SSRI side effect.
Likewise, suppose I said to you, "there's been a breakthrough! Someone has discovered how to prevent most cancers in people aged 60+." "What is it?" you ask, astonished and eager to hear the answer. "Kill them all at 65," I say. You'd get the logic of it, the way it's sort of true, but you'd be likely to take my response as sort of a dark joke. Or imagine there's a contest, where researchers and anyone else who wants to submits ideas for preventing cancer in people aged 60+, and I submitted my "prevention" plan. Unless somebody in the contest had just discovered a novel and highly effective cancer preventive or treatment, my idea would probably win, right? But don't you think most people would consider that unfair? Like it's not really prevention in the sense the contest was talking about?
Am I right in thinking we don't currently have the technology to harvest some eggs and sperm from a couple, genetically screen the eggs and sperm individually, and then make a single IVF embryo from a "winning" pair?
If we did, I'm curious to see how that would change people's intuitions and moral calculus. I expect those who believe that life begins at conception and that screening and discarding embryos is a bit like screening and killing babies would be OK with this alternative, and those who object to schizophrenia screening on disability-rights grounds would not, and those who object to it on the grounds of playing God or meddling with fate also would not.
I am vaguely in the first camp (although not militantly, and I acknowledge it can be the lesser of two evils), and I would be basically OK with the technology described above and consider it to be much better morally than making 10 embryos and discarding 9 of them, whether randomly or based on screening. (Although, secondarily, I also have some slight qualms about the future society-wide effects if people are allowed to fully customise their kids' genetic makeup).
I wonder where does this intuition come from? What is so special about the union of the gametes that changes the moral calculus from "non-issue" (discarding millions of gametes to pick the best ones) to "murder" (discarding a few embryos)? If you look under the microscope there isn't really anything interesting going on during fertilization. Just some wiggling sperms, then the acrosome reaction occurs, the cortical granules fuse, and voila, you have a zygote. Where is this "life" they are talking about? Aren't gametes also alive? If so, why is the life of zygote so much more special than the life of gametes? It's so puzzling.
Yes, the argument is that the line is drawn when it is a living thing with a full set of human DNA, ie an embryo. It is a pretty logical line (I believe it to be the most logical of the different possible options). You may not agree with it but I you should at least be able to understand it.
The zygote is, biologically, the very first stage of human development. Its the moment when an individual human life starts. Before fertilization you have Adam's sperm cells and Betty's egg, afterwards you have baby Cindy.
This is a biological fact, and is not scientifically controversial. Naturally you can understand that a zygote is an individual human life and still believe it doesn't have rights or isn't worthy of moral consideration.
I would disagree. The zygote is not the first step, it is one of many steps on the path from the parental generation to the filial generation. The haploid gamete is a individual entity, with a unique genome that is a step away from parental diploid form. The diploid zygote formed from gametes is another individuating step away from the parental forms. It's all little molecular machines doing their stuff, so that months later a new person may emerge.
Of course I understand that the zygote is an individual human life, like any human cell, haploid, diploid or syncytium. As I said, what I really do not understand is why so many people get hung up on the "individual human life" thing. Life is not thought. A cell is not a person. Every human cell has a unique genome because every mitosis introduces a few random mutations. Who cares! Persons matter, not "lives".
The zygote is the first stage of development for any human: before that point there is no organism to develop further. An egg is not an organism, nor is a sperm, but a fertilized egg is.
This is obvious if you look at any other animal species: nobody argues that fox sperm are individual foxes, or that there is no first stage of development for elephants. The only reason people bend out of their way to argue that it's different for humans is the abortion issue. You yourself say "Who cares! Person's matter, not "lives"": well, if it's personhood that really matters then why argue all this ballyhoo about a zygote not being the first step of human development? Why not just say "Yes, a zygote is the first stage of human development but it does not have the qualities necessary to be a person be worthy of moral consideration." That's a perfectly respectable position: yet instead you try to argue that personhood is what matters, and also the zygote is not a member of H. Sapiens.
You can't sequence a sperm cell on its own without destroying it as each sperm cell only has one copy of each chromosome (unless the father has macrozoospermia, in which case it has 4 but that makes you infertile as you'd expect).
"Am I right in thinking we don't currently have the technology to harvest some eggs and sperm from a couple, genetically screen the eggs and sperm individually, and then make a single IVF embryo from a winning pair?"
Yes, this is correct. It's very disappointing, because if you're lucky you can get ~10 eggs, but you can get 300 million sperm. If we could genotype individual sperm, we could definitely select for whatever crazy out-of-distribution traits we wanted.
IIRC we do have this technology for sperm, since X-chromosome sperm have a higher mass than Y-chromosome sperm, and you can separate them with a centrifuge.
Yes, but that's just determining which sperm carry an X and which carry a Y. Actually genotyping or sequencing the genome that sperm carries isn't possible without destroying it.
OK, sorry for not being clear enough. Let me explain. "Genotyping" is a generic term for checking a specific genomic feature. Yes, it can refer to X/Y presence, but it normally refers to looking for specific single nucleotide variants. That's what is used when calculating a polygenic risk score - you need to know the variants in multiple ("poly") locations. Currently it is not possible to look at DNA at the base level without wrecking the cell carrying it. If that cell happens to be the only cell carrying the DNA you want to look at - in this case, the sperm - then you cannot have your cell and genotype it.
Every argument in this post would suggest that sex-selective IVF and/or abortion is OK. These are typically seen as morally repugnant - and are serious criminal offenses where I live. Is Scott willing to bite that bullet?
Being pro-choice doesn't mean viewing a foetus as having no rights. It's perfectly possible to think a foetus has rights, but - for example - in the difficult situation where the baby is unwanted, the mother's rights have priority. Similarly, being pro-IVF in the tragic situation where a couple would otherwise be infertile doesn't mean being pro-IVF always and for any reason.
The strongest argument is that if you're doing IVF anyway, you may as well screen for schizophrenia. But if that is allowed, then couples who would otherwise conceive naturally will use IVF. So you're not "doing IVF anyway," in aggregate.
The whole post is full of the kind of analogical reasoning that Scott would normally reject. What happened to utilitarianism? Why isn't the question "Are we better off as a society if this is permitted?"
No, because nobody here considers being (fe)male as a negative. For any disease that we can agree on is sufficiently bad, I don't see how a utilitarist calculus of polygenic screening comes out as anything but positive (though I'm admittedly not really an utilitarist). An imbalanced sex ratio on the other hand is pretty straightforward bad.
[Scott voice] Who says we'd get an imbalanced sex ratio? People who want daughters will get daughters, people who want sons will get sons. And if a couple really want a daughter, it's definitely worse for them, and the baby, to get a son. You're doing the screening anyway, may as well select for parental wishes.[/Scott voice]
Of course, while such selection may seem OK in theory at first blush, in practice people will select boys, akin to the 100 Million Missing Women. And this should make us look again at the theory, and realise that encouraging sex selection - or selection in general - isn't theoretically sound to begin with.
Sure, that's true in the case of sex. Allowing selection for it is pretty much all downside no upside in practice. But there is no equivalent for serious, debilitating diseases; 10.000 Missing Schizophrenics would only be a tragedy in the case of already-existing people. Having less schizophrenics and more non-schizophrenics born is an unalloyed good, the same way there is no tragedy of 10.000 Missing Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
The 10,000 missing schizotypes would be a tragedy, in that having fewer people who answer yes to questions like “Do you have strong feelings or beliefs that are very important to you, about such things as religion, philosophy, or politics?”, “Do you daydream a lot or find yourself preoccupied with stories, fantasies, or ideas?”, and “Do you feel you have special gifts or talents?” would really suck. Schizophrenia PRS is not just about "developing schizophrenia"!
This is as silly as saying there is no downside to happy families in the sex selection question. You have to analyse the result of instituting the proposed rule, not the "results" of the benefits you hope to obtain. The fact that you think that allowing selection for schizophrenia is positive in practice, when it basically doesn't exist, speaks volumes.
> Of course, while such selection may seem OK in theory at first blush, in practice people will select boys, akin to the 100 Million Missing Women.
Edit: my previous comment was callously worded, so I'm going to try to re-state what I was going for.
It is not a given for all people, in general, to overwhelmingly select boys.
First off, people are allowed to have preferences. Most couples will have normal reasons, like "I don't feel equipped to handle a boy/girl," for whatever reason. Some couples will be more sinister about it, and will abuse any kids who happen to be born the "wrong" sex. If sex-selection were banned, there *will* be such children. That is a direct cost of a ban. The last thing I'd want to do is force a little girl to grow up in a family that does not value women.
I don't support limiting the benign couples, because freedom. I *definitely* don't support limiting the sinister couples, because harm reduction. Any ban on sex-selection better be worth this massive downside, and it better prevent some serious societal problems.
And... I don't think there is a strong enough preference for boys in the West in order for this to become a societal problem. We don't have male primogeniture or any of the other extremely strong socioeconomic incentives that prioritize sons over daughters elsewhere. In places that *do* have this attitude, and *have* been overwhelmingly selecting sons for multiple generations, a curious thing has been happening: yes, there's a demographic crisis, but also - daughters are now more valuable. Young women have gained social status/been able to pick better partners, much more than they otherwise would have in generations prior. This is most pronounced among the (upper) middle class in China right now. The families that chose daughters (and the accompanying attitudes that value daughters) are gaining social status. I predict that this feedback loop will self-correct the lopsided "male preference" attitude within a couple more generations.
So no, I don't think a ban on sex-selection is warranted. The potential "societal impacts" are overblown. And even in places that *do* have this problem, it seems to be self-correcting. It's not worth curtailing parents' choices to try to prevent some nebulous problem that we don't really have.
Yes - we can imagine circumstances where people wouldn't (on net) preferentially abort girls. But we need to deal with the world as it is. If a society had tolerant attitudes, what use would they have for sex-selective abortions or screenings? It seems like a practice that can only be used for evil, so is justly banned.
No - I don't wish for "poetic justice" on individuals or societies with beliefs you deem "terrible." I don't know that any of us is so wise that we haven't gone wrong somewhere. It seems foolish to hope fools get their comeuppance, and I hope you overcome your self-limiting belief before it causes you too many problems.
My PTSD agrees that my enemies should suffer for their horrible beliefs, but also thinks that your method of passively hoping for poetic justice is privileged, cowardly, and short-sighted. Think of all the people you could save from suffering if you directly eliminated those horrible beliefs right now!
The rest of me would like to refer you to one of the containment threads, to see the inevitable outcome.
Agreed on all points. Also, carrying and raising a child is an _enormous_ effort, costly in time, in attention, physiologically for the mother, and financially (which is why I, personally, am childfree - particularly due to the time sink component of cost). Given how much parents will invest in their child, I'm happy to see them have all the options science can give them for selecting the child they wish to raise. To the extent "designer babies" are feasible, I'm happy for parents to have that option.
Another example situation: Natural fertilisation. When medical doctors explain that before fertilisation, only functional sperm reaches the egg, and then in the first week(s) of pregancy a dysfunctional foetus will often naturally be aborted, pretty much nobody ever thinks that this is a tragedy, that we should allow all those sperm to fertilize eggs no matter how dysfunctional they are. Or that we should try to develop technology to forcibly get a dysfunctional foetus to be carried to term despite the body trying to abort it.
We put a lot of effort into keeping dysfunctional babies alive, I think the reason we don't put effort into keeping dysfunctional embryos alive is that it's much harder to do and is a less visible problem, not that we don't consider embryonic humans valuable: they're certainly valuable to the woman trying to conceive!
I'm not sure of the detail of 1 . Aren't eggs all produced at the initial development of the ovary, not once a month? Given that the body must then choose ~1 each month to ovulate, it's plausible that it does so by ovulating them in some predefined order, so that the choice not to drink doesn't affect which egg is ovulated. A better argument would be that everything affects which sperm ends up fertilising the egg.
I think this dilemma is sharpest if you think about people wanting to select against deafness. Deaf people who are part of signing culture often believe that deaf culture is valuable and not merely an adaptation, and (congenital) deafness should be considered a variation not a disability. As such they would argue that selection is immoral. I don't know any deaf people so I have not thought about this much, but I guess the best argument would be that the decision to select in the first place is the immoral step, not that the step of selection is discriminating against individual deaf embryos. But I don't know how a deaf person would actually argue.
"I'm not sure of the detail of 1 . Aren't eggs all produced at the initial development of the ovary, not once a month? Given that the body must then choose ~1 each month to ovulate, it's plausible that it does so by ovulating them in some predefined order, so that the choice not to drink doesn't affect which egg is ovulated. A better argument would be that everything affects which sperm ends up fertilising the egg."
This is why I claimed that the rehab took three months.
Not alone conception, you need to stay sober during pregnancy. No point being sober until you conceive, then going out and getting wasted every weekend for the next nine months.
Selecting against schizophrenic embryos would be systematic, whereas Situations 1 and 3 here just randomly re-roll what baby ends up being made. Situation 2 is slightly selective - I assume the healthiest embryo is chosen to maximise odds of surviving pregnancy? If so I suppose that only makes sense, but if they're being selected to be taller/smarter/etc. as children/adults that makes me uncomfortable too.
I don't mind an action changing what baby is made so long as it's a random re-roll of the die, but if we start normalising the systematic prevention of certain types embryos that would've been babies due to their 'worse genes', where does it end? People will start selecting their children for all the high-status traits such as intelligence, height, and so on.
Some of this is clearly Molochian: when everyone defects and selects an embryo to be taller, we'll simply find that the old desired heights like 6 foot 1 simply become the new 'short' lower-status heights. Desiring greater height is about wanting to be taller than peers, not being taller absolutely. And height is correlated with shorter life-expectancy, so this purely harms everyone's children for the sake of not being left in the dust by everyone else's defection.
Selection for intelligence seems very risky: would speed up AGI development.
But more generally, if people start heavily selecting their children for all sorts of traits (perhaps even using CRISPR and the like for some genetic engineering) then - assuming we haven't gone extinct a while from now - will we not just select ourselves out of existence, into some new species? It reminds me of the thought experiment - I think it was on SSC - where Gandhi could gain a reward by taking a pill to become 99% as good, but he decides not to because then he'd be fine getting another reward for taking a pill that makes him 98% as good, and so on and so forth until he'd be 0% good; and 100% good Gandhi did not want to end up 0% good.
I would like it if humanity stays 100% human, and does not - via some situation where the Ship of Theseus problem meets the slow-boiling frog - slowly replace its genetics (and thus its phenotype) over a timespan too long for it to be bothered with or realise fully the consequences, until our successors have become some creature that is wholly alien to us.
Selection is already happening, all the time. It's just that right now, we're selecting against/for things that we have no say in. Some of these are good - contraceptives selects for parents that actually *want* children as opposed to having them involuntarily - some are pretty bad - contraceptives also selects against cautious people who postpone childrearing until it's too late, and selects for impulsive people who first forgets to take the contraceptive and then decide to keep the child on a whim. Imo the modern world is pretty weird in terms of the things it's selecting for/against. After enough time, all the current selection pressures will also lead to populations almost unrecognizable to our current way of living, just as our current way of living is unrecognizable to people in the far past. I'd prefer if we would have a say in it, since then we at least get a chance to keep the parts we truly care about.
The ability to select an entire generation out of having practically any schizophrenics would be much more rapid and extreme than anything that's been occurring naturally. I can't think of anything similar in our history over even a dozen or so generations, let alone in a single generation. And then of course we can select embryos for all sorts of other things, and we can use genetic engineering to modify them even further.
> After enough time, all the current selection pressures will also lead to populations almost unrecognizable to our current way of living, just as our current way of living is unrecognizable to people in the far past
That is also a problem to me - but again this issue seems a lot further in the future. Homo sapiens has existed for hundreds of thousands of years; presumably natural breeding will not exterminate us that rapidly. (Though I have heard theories that our evolution has been rapidly accelerating since the Agricultural Revolution.)
> I'd prefer if we would have a say in it, since then we at least get a chance to keep the parts we truly care about.
I suppose I actually agree with this - maybe my main concern is less the selection itself and more who is doing it, and thus what will be done. If we hypothetically had a highly-competent government which only selected embryos to be healthier (fewer genetic heart diseases, less likely to develop schizophrenia, etc.) I would not mind this.
(Indeed it could be good not only for health but to ensure the human race doesn't drift into being some other species over even a very long timescale - thereby solving the issue mentioned in the 2nd paragraph of this comment.)
My concern is mostly individuals being allowed to select embryos for their own children. This would lead to height-selection (which as aforementioned, seems that when done by everyone it harms all and helps none), and selection for all sorts of other things like exotic eye-colors and God knows what other bodily modifications in order to try to give social-status to the baby-to-be.
"The ability to select an entire generation out of having practically any schizophrenics would be much more rapid and extreme than anything that's been occurring naturally."
Sure, but are we *sure* we can guarantee that? I see Down's Syndrome children brought up in comments here, and there isn't a way to stop any more Down's Syndrome merely by polygenic selection, you have to constantly do that (or abortion, if you're not doing pre-pregnancy selection) to have 'no more Down's Syndrome children'.
And that's a crap shoot, too; at my place of work, the child with Down's Syndrome then got a younger sibling who was perfectly normal. Same parents, mother was older by two or three years when she got pregnant the second time, different outcomes.
I wonder if there is a magic cure - we know *these* genes and *these* alone cause schizophrenia! - to be found here, such that by preventing offspring carrying those genes from being born, we'll get rid of schizophrenia in three generations. I think we might find out "hang on, there are still schizophrenics, how is *that* happening?"
If you know better, please inform me! I am interested to learn these things.
The difference between the selection of the low-risk embryo and Situation 1, the Alcoholic, is that in the initial example, you already have ten embryos created and in existence. In the case of the Alcoholic, she isn't pregnant yet. "Stop drinking before you get pregnant" is not the same thing as "You're pregnant with triplets, you drunk, now pick two to abort on the basis that one might be less retarded than the others".
The reason that Situation 1 is not the same thing at all, that this is not "preventing FAS = preventing schizophrenia", is because there is no existing life (we can argue about moral worth of embryos later, but can we at least accept that these are living cells with the potential to become babies?) in Situation 1 - the alcoholic isn't being asked to submit ten embryos and we'll implant the one without FAS. The alcoholic isn't pregnant at all yet! The situations are not comparable.
The way they *would* be comparable is if in both cases, the doctor says to schizophrenic genes parents "Given your family history, if you conceive a child, there's a high risk of schizophrenia" and to the alcoholic "Given your history of alcohol abuse, if you conceive a child, there's a high risk of FAS" and then the parents in both instances have to make a decision.
Outcome in Situation 1 is only the same if the Alcoholic says "But doc, I love getting drunk, I don't want to give up drinking. Tell you what, I'll do IVF and you pick which embryo isn't a retard, okay?"
She has a relatively easy solution to her problem - get sober and stay sober before and during pregnancy. The gene-carriers don't have an easy solution, they can't abstain from anything or take anything which will allow them to have 'non-schizophrenic genes gametes'. 'Preventing schizophrenia' and 'preventing FAS' are not at all the same thing here. In one case, you're asking "don't bring a child into existence while you're a drunk", in the other you have "ten potential children exist, we must destroy nine" to avoid the problematic pregnancy.
> Selection for intelligence seems very risky: would speed up AGI development.
It's the opposite, I think. Smarter humans have less need for AI, and are better able to solve coordination problems, including the coordination problem that is "nobody develop better AI". If we manage to push the boundaries of human intelligence, or even just roll more geniuses until we get lucky, we may well get someone(s) who can solve AI alignment or work out a way to merge with our AIs so that the future remains fundamentally human.
I think this prospect unnerves me a little (not enough to oppose it straightforwardly), but I think I figured out what my unease is from.
At this point, polygenic selection is straightforwardly good. It gets a little less good when the technology improves enough to predict things like personality traits.
Wouldn't it be bad if parents had an outsized control over the inherent traits of their children? Hypothetically you have parents that want a child for less noble reasons (maybe they want a live in servant that is forever tied to them, plenty of abusive parents treat their kids like this).
Are you able to stop them from selecting an embryo that is more likely to be gullible and easy to manipulate? Are you able to stop them from picking an embryo born with a chronic condition that is treatable with medicine, so that the parents always have the leash with which to control the kid and train them into a kind of house slave?
Dipping into the realm of celebrity gossip, there's some fairly credible rumours that a supermodel, whose mother was a supermodel, was forced to get a rhinoplasty at 14 and also ended up with disordered eating from maintaining the body shape. While she has a very successful modelling career, it's pretty clear that she didn't really choose to be a model and mostly just got pressured into it. Imagine if this mother had access to genetic engineering. What's to stop wealthy obsessive supermodel types like this woman from engineering humans like pugs - attractive, with lots of health problems linked to the appearance based breeding, and then forcing them to do as the parent wishes?
Yes, these are really hypothetical problem right now. What can we do to stop parents from infringing on the rights of future people, when the technology becomes viable?
In conclusion - it's great to use this tech for chronic incurable health issues currently. I think we need to really formalise rights of children before it gets to the point where parents get full control of every aspect of unborn children, because it could get really bad.
Yeah, I'm possibly a bit more liberal than you here because I think IQ selection would be really good, but I also draw the line at other personality traits.
If I were Czar, I'd allow health and IQ related outcomes, but ban most personality related selection until we had a better idea what's going on. If the coalitions end up being "ban all" vs. "allow all", I think I'm on the allow all side, but I'll grumble about it.
Does this mean that you believe relative intelligence dictates to some extent the value of human life?
Would you then consider an AI of super-human intelligence to be of greater value - or its existence more "sacred" (for lack of a better word) - than a human being with an IQ of, say, 90?
I'll go off on a tangent here and point out that sometimes slaves were bought for their intelligence (classically, Greek tutors), but other times they were bought for other reasons and their intelligence was irrelevant or merely needed to be above a minimum. So yes, lives can be and have been valued for intelligence. But there's no single "value"; all potential buyers have their own criteria. And sellers get better prices when the market is larger, because they can target the buyer who assigned the most value.
Anyway, I think Scott clearly puts a high value on intelligence. If you think the world would be a better place if everyone were a bit smarter, or if no one were too stupid, then you do too. (There are other traits that are probably good overall, but I think rationalists view intelligence as a meta-trait that allows better identification of valuable traits.) And one can say "I like chocolate" without wanting to genetically engineer the rest of the human species to crave chocolate at every moment, and without converting the entire universe into a ball of chocolate, and without wanting to build a chocolate calf for the people to worship.
If I say that to see is preferable to being blind, does it imply that an AI with a camera is more valuable than a blind human?
Intelligence is an advantage for a human in the same way the eyesight is. For many other traits, there seems to be some trade-off, so it would be potentially dangerous to move the entire society one way. But low intelligence seems to have no advantages per se.
I wouldn't have an issue with intelligence. My main concern is parents deliberately kneecapping future children to make them easier to control. Better health and intellect is the opposite of that - the child would be able to perceive better options and escape routes, so I'm fine with that.
>My main concern is parents deliberately kneecapping future children to make them easier to control.
I agree that that would be bad. If a couple is willing to do that, I'd expect that they generally don't have their child's best interests at heart. I doubt that the genetic option changes the situation all that much. There are lots of abusive parents out there, and not all that much that can be done about them without creating coercive invasive government control that is often worse.
This test is well thought of. It has only a low positive correlation with intelligence. People with autism score poorly on it, but so do various others. Seems to me that ability to grasp what others are feeling is part of being empathic. The other part is resonating to what they feel, rather than simply using the info you've gleaned for some end of your own. And I'd also throw in a low propensity for violence and rage. Do these traits tend to co-occur? It seems to me they do, but I have not looked atthe research. Is there evidence that these traits are heritable. I don't know.
But nobody even seems curious about it. I simply cannot understand why everyone thinks that it is far more important to select for IQ than for empathy and gentleness -- traits that are likely to lead to less crime, torture, exploitation of others, murder and war. Is it that people think the amount of person-on-person violence is not that high? WTF? Is it that people think that the solution to war and cruelty is tech, because tech solves problems like hunger that might otherwise drive people to war, etc, and so we need more smart people to producer more tech breakthroughs?
Tech's a pretty indirect solution. Case in point: The present discussion, which concerns a very expensive, tech-heavy medical procedure that could save parents from having a schizophrenic child. It's a perfect example of cool tech that is going to help most of the world not at all. It will be available only to the wealthy for quite a while, I'd say. That's a demonstration of why tech is not as great as one might think at reducing people's cruelty to each other by reducing hunger, illness, etc.
Very interesting test! Somehow I got 27/36 correct. I'm not totally opposed to your argument here but I do have a few counterpoints.
1) Is it gentleness and empathy we need to upregulate, or sociopathy we need to downregulate? It seems to me that the upstream problem is sociopaths creating Molochian situations, in which normies then struggle to act with kindness to others.
2) Have you seen the famous 4chan image about anon researches IQ?
The basic argument is that a significant fraction of humanity lacks the intellectual horsepower to model another person's mind, and are thus functionally sociopathic. See also the meme of asking someone whether they had breakfast. If this argument is true, then higher IQ will lead to more empathy.
About downregulating sociopaths: The eyes test doesn't measure the quality I'm talking about, just a part of it: perceiving how others are feeling. The other part of what I'm calling empathy is *caring* what others are feeling. Probably many sociopaths are good at the first part. To be a successful con artist you have to be good at seeing how your mark is feeling and thinking. I don't know what tests there are tests of the kind of perceptive empathy I have in mind, though I'm sure there are some, or what's known about how heritable the trait is.
About the 4chan stuff: IMO the person who wrote that is pretty dumb about people. Before we even get to the examples, consider this: If an adult has an IQ between 80 & 90 , their performance on IQ tests is going to be like that of a 10-12 year old of average intelligence. So could a kid that age answer the question "if somebody heard her son had been killed, how do you think she would feel?" Of course they could, right? So I dunno what's going on with the people tested who were unable to answer these questions, but it's not that their intellectual functioning is so poor that they cannot form a model of how a person would feel or think in certain situations where to most of us the answer would be obvious.. Maybe they have a special deficit, separate from general intelligence, in understanding other's feelings. Maybe they have trained themselves not to contemplate other's feelings. Maybe they just hate the question because they feel like it's an exercise in making them feel guilty. You can say the same about most of the other questions on the page-- normal 10-12 year olds could answer them. Therefore, if these people cannot answer them the explanation is not that their general intelligence is too low.
Here’s a chart from an article about the ability of kids in kindergarten through 4th grade to answer theory of mind questions correctly. https://imgur.com/a/bYpoAaS (The Development of Advanced Theory of Mind in Middle Childhood: A Longitudinal Study From Age 5 to 10 Years
Note that recursion is on there, and so is double bluffing, and 3-level false beliefs (A incorrectly believes that B incorrectly believes the C incorrectively believes X.)
The writer said more than 50% of those tested were illiterate. So were these questions delivered orally? For some of them, for instance the recursion question about stories within stories, I think *I* might struggle a bit if it was delivered orally. Hearing it once I’d get the gist, but probably would lose some details about how many characters had to be in each level of story-within-story, and how many lines of dialogue each had to speak. So I would probably have asked the examiner to repeat the question a time or 2. Did these subjects? My guess is that they would not. So these subjects either had the question delivered orally or, if they were not illiterate, had to read it. Seems likely that the ones not illiterate would have poor reading skills, and would not be great at taking in these instructions, which are not simple.
I’m a psychologist and have talked to many people with IQ’s in the 80-90 range. If you want to find out what they can do mentally, you have to make sure they understand the question. Otherwise, you’re simultaneously testing their ability to grasp the instructions and their ability to follow them, and the result is confounded. Normally tests are set up so that all subjects are able to understand the questions. If you have to give a test that is not really set up for the subjects you have, you have to adapt it.So for instance for question 1, I’d initially ask it the original way, then if they seemed not to understand the question I might say: Did you eat breakfast and lunch yesterday? (Yes, they say). So let’s say you could go back in time to yesterday morning and live yesterday again. Know what I mean? (Yes, they say). So let’s pretend that you lived yesterday morning exactly the same way you did before, except that you skipped breakfast and lunch. Can you picture that? (Yes). So how do you think you would be feeling in the evening of this yesterday? (Starving). AND, once I’d taken them through the first question that way, they would probably no longer need all the scaffolding, but could answer questions of this kind if they were stated simply. So what I was doing the first time through was teaching them to understand the question.
Obviously, people with extremely low IQ’s really aren’t able to understand even simple things about what other people would feel in a certain situation. But it is completely untrue that people in the 80-100 range cannot do that. I don’t know wtf is wrong with the person who wrote this page. The testing they were doing in prison makes me thing they were a grad student in psychology. Psychologists all know the stuff I’ve explained here about theory of mind and the abilities of people in the low to low-average IQ range..
I’m curious if you think that parents selecting for higher intelligence is something that would be uniformly distributed over the range of the intelligence of the parents?
I.e. would allowing this tend to shift the distribution of intelligence uniformly to the right? Or would people of lower or average intelligence be less inclined to make that choice (even assuming, say, that the procedure is free and equally available to everyone), resulting in a bimodal distribution where the smart people produce even smarter children but the rest do not?
I’m not saying the latter would necessarily be *bad*, but it would certainly upend a lot of societal assumptions. (Of course, recent trends in choosing mates may get us there regardless, though probably not as quickly.)
It might also compress the range, at least at the top. Fixing well-understood failure modes, while sometimes hard, is often easier than improving the functioning of a system that is reasonably well tuned.
I submit to you - who cares? I mean, this whole argument is "what if people select on crappy traits I don't like?"
Right now, crappy parents are propagating their crappy traits, willy-nilly. Not only that, but crappy people are generally only able to breed with OTHER crappy people who introduce *whole new forms of crappiness* into their mutual kids! It's madness!
You're pointing to a far out edge case that might affect 1 in 10k or 1 in 100k polygenically selected kids with crappy traits you don't like. The current crappy-traits-from-parents dynamic is fully 50-80% of ALL parents. Which is the worse scenario?
Not to mention that most people care about their grandkids, at the minimum - if you're selecting for brainless servants, your line will either extinguish or become brainless servants, and most people aren't going to be happy with that outcome.
If you're selecting for attractiveness as in the supermodel scenario, that's a GOOD thing - the bad thing was the crappy parenting afterwards, about which I once again submit to you that crappy parenting is the dominant case today, so who cares?
The argument is not "what if people select on crappy traits". The argument is "what if people use trait selection to engineer a population they can control easily".
At the moment, if you're a child born to abusive controlling parents, the extent of their control ends at nature. They can tell you lies, but if you're born inquisitive and clever, you can see through them and slowly struggle free.
People who weren't smart enough aren't so lucky, and I consider that a tragedy. But the moment parents have the ability to actively ensure that their kids are too dumb to resist manipulation is where it goes into horror territory for me.
The ability to design your children has the power to shift the parental demographic! Currently, the very self interested people won't have kids, because it's very high risk, high effort with very uncertain pay off. If you can choose your kid, the calculus will shift - you'd select for an anxious kid who will rarely assert their needs, gullible (low effort), and loyal (high reward). You have maybe one or two of these dumb slave kids, then have one that you actually want to continue your line. It's perfectly logical - have some low effort kids you don't care about, and exploit their labour to raise the high effort kid that you do care about. You and your high effort kids can sterilise the idiots easily.
I think the overall state of the gene pool is irrelevant to the fact that people will now be able to create people who may lead lives of unimaginable suffering, optimising for some random trait that is orthogonal to actually being happy. If you can give someone anorexia from birth I don't doubt some parents would be stupid or vain enough to try.
>the fact that people will now be able to create people who may lead lives of unimaginable suffering, optimising for some random trait that is orthogonal to actually being happy
I mean, this is just "crappy traits" with a tiny bit more specificity. What do you think *makes* a trait crappy? It produces suffering in the people who have it. Right now, that's the human condition and the dominant paradigm - the ONLY way out of this current "crappily suffering" paradigm is gengineering! Propensity to diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, etc - all suffering. Being able to reach beyond that, and being able to create healther, stronger, smarter humans at scale, is going to require gengineering.
Sure, you point to an impossibly long-tail fictional edge case of people breeding several mindless slaves to raise their one "real" kid. Let's just take it as given that this is a significant problem, and say, 5% of gengineering parents do this. Well, how do you think their one "real" kid is going to do in the world? They either have the genes for psychopathy in them (if the parents chose that), or not. If they don't, they're a regular person who isn't going to propagate any unnecessary suffering. If they do have the genes for psychopathy, they're not going to succeed or breed as much as the 99% of other parents breeding healthy, high IQ, cooperative kids who understand game theory and the power of coordination, and will be outcompeted unto extinction.
On the balance of civlizational and human suffering, which arm is bigger? The heart disease / diabetes / cancer / mental illness arm, currently affecting approximately everyone, or the "exceptionally psychopathic parents could create literal slaves for children" arm, which has basically nobody?
"99% of other parents breeding healthy, high IQ, cooperative kids who understand game theory and the power of coordination"
The unquestioning faith in the miracles of science on display here has me laughing. I'll stick to praying to St. Anne and St. Gerard Majella for optimum outcomes around childbirth, it's just as good as "our Midwich Cuckoos will be superhuman, I tell you, but *nice* superhumans!"
If they understand game theory, they may decide that being a freerider gives them immediate advantage and that is worth more to them than the long term 'let's all hold hands and agree to cut the pie into equal slices' decisions.
I disagree with the way you characterise crap traits, because there are situations where these set of traits would be perfectly fine - or even a net benefit to have.
In fact, it's a net benefit to be a hard worker who bonds easily with other people and wants to minimise conflict in an environment where people aren't assholes! This person tends to be well-loved in their community, and since they're usually very easy to love, they tend to attract the protection of their community - provided that they started out in a loving family, where people around them looked out for their best interests and helped them develop some basic boundaries and recognise bad actors.
It's not fair to bundle "someone who can be abused given [starting conditions]" with diabetes and cancer. I definitely agree that we should take any measure to prevent diseases that cause a burden on life.
If it helps, I'm thinking about this somewhat philosophically - if there are steps to this technology, I'm fully onboard with the "cure cancer", "cure SIDS", etc steps, but I do think there are steps beyond (eg engineer specific personality traits) which need to be seriously considered before the technology actually gets there.
I think the approach probably involves considering the rights of children and formalising parental responsibilities to something that includes the best lifelong interests of children, maybe something including the right of independence or something.
So by all means, do the work to select for less likely to have congenital heart failure. But we also need to do the work to prevent the tech from getting abused down the road.
Generally parents are benevolent towards their children. Out love is pure, we really want what is best for them. Do you feel that a significant percentage of parents would choose to breed their children into slaves? How many percent would act in this way? 10%? 1%?
A blanket ban on parental choice of embryos would be throwing 99 babies away with the bathwater for every one that you (theoretically) save from abuse.
I guess the counterpump is that once the precident is set then what other conditions can a couple choose to select for at IVF? The sex of the baby? What if they have a religion that considers schizophrenics to be prophets and so they want to maximise that chance? What if they're convinced the most important thing for humanity is to maximise genetic diversity and so they want to select the one with the most genetic mutation? What if technology develops to the point where we can predict the future personality of the baby and everyone always chooses the same option?
On individual levels, it's a moral problem but at scale some become societal problem because they distort the population.
The obvious answer is to have the state allow certain selections but not others, which is basically where we're at now. But I can see the case that this grants the government a problematic power to decide on the genetic makeup of the population, and that this is a dangerous road to wander down.
I think there is an assumption underlying these discussions that two embryos with different starting genes will grow up to be different people. While a reasonable assumption, I'm not sure this should be taken for granted. Consciousness is poorly understood, but it feels like a 'person' (in the sense of being a sentient entity) may be better defined by the atoms that form its nervous system than by its starting genes.
If the set of molecules that become a nervous system is more robust to genetic variation than we expect, then we wouldn't be creating entirely different people from the same starting embryos. We are only equipping the person with a different set of genes. Viewed this way, then it would definitely be an ethical good to choose the 'best' embryo (assuming this 'best' is well defined).
If this all sounds hand wavy, that's because it is. There are a lot of open questions, like whether what matters is if some subset of molecules form a specific part of the brain, or how many molecule difference it would take for a person to be considered 'different', how much variation there is brain development, etc. However, I think it's important to discuss given how it could drastically change our starting points.
Here's the more appropriate thought experiment: Suppose at the point of conception, we are able to branch reality into two. For one reality, we conceive with a control embryo. For the other, we change the genetic code ever so slightly. If the changed embryo had one minor gene knocked out, then it seems reasonable for the changed embryo to grow up to be the same 'person' (in the sense of being the same sentient entity), but with one different trait. If we increase the number of genetic changes, at some point it is possible that a different 'person' (i.e. a different sentient entity) will have been born. What this point is can't really be said for certain - it is possible that 'personness' is very robust to genetic changes, or it may take only a handful of genetic changes for a person to be someone else.
I argue that 'atoms that become a nervous system' is our best guess proxy for personhood (short of relying on arguments from spirits).
If everyone, or even a sizeable fraction of the at-risk population, used polygenic selection to filter against schizoprenia, then within a few generations we might end up "breeding out" an unwanted trait. So arguably every individual couple who chooses that route is also lowering the prevalence of the condition at the population level by a tiny amount.
I was going to point out that scenario 1 doesn't work as a response to the argument it's being mustered against, but William H Stoddard has already done that!
Here's my problem with scenario 2:
> It’s true that embryo #5 was briefly destined to be implanted and born and grow into a human being, and that the doctor’s decision caused that not to happen. But almost nobody would consider this an injury done to embryo #5 or consider this to be impermissible meddling in the threads of Fate. Nobody would say that, once the intern had picked #5, it was wrong for the doctor to switch to #7 in the name of health.
I agree that nobody says this. But that's not because they're committed to moral consistency. It's because injuries to embryos don't matter. When similar injuries happen to adults, they are recognized as injuries.
Let's take the example of Miss Universe 2015. Voting (secretly) determined that the winner was Miss Philippines. The MC (publicly) announced that the winner was Miss Colombia. Then, shortly afterward, the MC announced that he had been mistaken the first time, and the winner was in fact Miss Philippines.
Everyone recognizes this as an injury to Miss Colombia. It's not necessarily a big injury, but the MC apologized -- and imagine what people would have thought if he hadn't! -- and faced ongoing jokes about the mishandling of the event.
Drawing an analogy to scenario 2, we see that, at minimum, embryo 5 is owed an apology by the doctor. But really, the injury being dealt to embryo 5 is 𝗳𝗮𝗿 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗲 than the injury that was dealt to Miss Colombia. (I hope that, even though the fact that an injury occurred at all was not immediately obvious, the fact that it is much more severe than the parallel injury to Miss Colombia is obvious!)
This is because living is more important than being named Miss Universe 2015. The difference in severity of the injury that we perceive should correspond directly to the difference in importance between being alive (vs. dead) and being named Miss Universe 2015 (vs. not).
If you believe that embryos have moral weight, then the doctor has committed a very grievous wrong against embryo #5. The reason most people do not believe that the doctor has done so is that they do not assign moral weight to embryos.
You're not exactly disputing my point that "the reason most people do not believe that the doctor has [wronged embryo #5] is that they do not assign moral weight to embryos."
Also, I can understand correcting a misspelling within a quote, but you really shouldn't doctor a quote from someone else to include misspellings that weren't there originally.
It also doesn't help the argument that the polygenic selection is picking the best embryo. If No. 5 and No. 7 have equal chances of being selected, it just depends who is doing the picking, then you can't meaningfully say No. 7 *is* better. Is the doctor going to review all the selections made by the intern and change them? If not, why not? Why pick *this* selection as being a bad one? It seems random.
And I think that's how polygenic selection will, in fact, work out. Glossy brochure from the clinic promising you best of the best, reality is low paid (by comparison with what it would cost in the USA or Western Europe) technician at a bench processing hundreds of embryos a day according to a checklist, and if there's a slip-up oh well, it's not like the baby is going to be visibly deformed, right? No money back if you didn't get your Nobel Prize winner like you expected, read the fine print!
Explaining tricky issues is one of Scott's great strengths. Here, there is nothing tricky - and if anyone thought there was, the first two examples should have helped. The third one seems "ouch" to me, but I guess there were such comments. - If none of this helped, I doubt anything can.
Example 2 does not make an argument about the definition of prevention but rather the ethics of embryo selection. I think there are two important differences between your examples 1 and 3 and embryo selection.
Firstly, in your examples a different baby being born is incidental rather than crucial for the preventive effect. In Example 1, there is nothing wrong the woman's eggs, there is something wrong with her behavior, which she fixes in rehab. This reduces the risk of her baby to be ill. Similarly, in Example 3, the preventive effect works through an adjustment in behavior, not the selection of the sperm.
Secondly, in Example 1 and 3, different eggs and sperm are used to create the baby but no reasonable person considers eggs and sperm to be human beings, whereas some people do consider embryos to be human beings. Selecting on the "ingredients" for humans may be seen as prevention, whereas selecting on "humans" themselves is not. Once you already have a "human", you can no longer prevent anything, you can only cull the weak!
Let me give you two counterexamples.
1. You bake 2 cakes with two eggs. One of the eggs is rotten. You can either bake both cakes and then smash the cake with the rotten egg in it, or you can simply choose not to bake the second cake and throw the rotten egg away. I think there is a meaningful way in which we can say that the first option does not prevent a bad cake from existing, while the second does.
2. You give birth to several children. Once the youngest is old enough, you give all of them psychological tests. You kill every child with bad scores for schizophrenia. Have you prevented schizophrenia? I guess, in some sense you did. However, I can also appreciate the difference to, say, improving the children's nutrition (or whatever). Culling the weak is different from supporting the weak to get strong.
Example 2 shows that the real argument is about whether an embryo is already a person or not. If you think that it is, and that culling the weak is not really the same as prevention, embryo selection is not prevention.
A broader point on the ethics of embryo selection: Some people might like randomness more than selection when it comes to creating babies for the following reason. If you select against something, that implies that the thing you select against is BAD. This implies that people with the thing are BAD. Therefore, you should treat them as BAD people. But I think that people with thing are GOOD and should be treated as GOOD people. Therefore, selecting against them is BAD.
This type of thinking makes sense if you put things in boxes labeled either GOOD or BAD and then put everything with strong associations with the original thing also in the same box. Personally, I think this type of reasoning is BAD but common. Sometimes it can even lead to opposition to curing a disease because an identity has formed from things in the GOOD box, see e.g. the deaf, HIV positives, and transgenders.
Not that I expect this to convince anyone, but traditionally the argument that life begins at conception comes from the idea of ensoulment. My understanding of the relevant religious arguments is that personhood also flows from ensoulment rather than physical characteristics, including genes (otherwise we have much bigger problems with things like resurrection, or even just radiation). How do we know whether the person conceived was given the same soul or not?
This is only intended as half sarcastic. I really would be interested if anyone has actually thought about this aspect of the question. There is at least significant (and ancient) discussion of the idea that the Abrahamic God sometimes puts a male soul in a female body and vice versa, so it cannot be that genetics fully constrains His choice.
Disclaimer: Devil's advocate post, I entirely think that preventing schizophrenia in this way is a good thing.
This feels like it's ignoring an important point.
The *other* selection criteria are not genetic, but this one is. If we get to a point where everyone uses Bujold-esque artificial wombs, selection by stochastic processes is not going to reduce the specie's genetic variability, but selection by genetic criteria very much would.
Re: the Alabama thing, in Italy we are not allowed to dispose of two frozen embryos even though we *know* they are so badly aneuploid that if implanted they'd get miscarried within weeks -- we will just have to pay €200/year to keep them frozen until Italian lawmakers realize how ridiculous this is or an AI turns us all into paperclips, whichever is first.
Just want to note that you've got the conclusion correct from a pro-life perspective: polygenic selection isn't really any new evil over and above the standard evil that takes place in IVF.
I said to myself I'd keep off this one since it's hot button, but I had to go after this sentence:
"But almost nobody would consider this an injury done to embryo #5 or consider this to be impermissible meddling in the threads of Fate."
*raises hand* Excuse me, Teacher, but I do!
Having stuck my head up, I now skulk back into the grimy recesses of the basket of the deplorables.
Carry on, men (and women and non-binary folx).
EDIT: You know an even better, more fool-proof way of preventing schizophrenia? Voluntary (or involuntary) sterilisation! Take your example couple here: they both have strong family history of schizophrenia, they both are at risk (even if they're not schizophrenic themselves) of having offspring with schizophrenia, and indeed in the example *nine* out of the ten embryos were high-risk! Clearly the best way to prevent another generation of schizophrenia is not to allow them to reproduce. Even if the tenth embryo had been implanted, it would have grown up to still be the generation that has "strong family history of schizophrenia on both sides" and still be a risk - remember, the parents themselves were not schizophrenic but the risk was there, was expressed in the vast majority of their embryos, and you can't know for sure the tenth embryo is totally free or is just as much 'at risk' as their parents of producing schizophrenic offspring if they meet up with the wrong partner and their genetic history.
The best thing for society, for the couple themselves, and even the putative tenth embryo is simply skip the step of reproduction altogether. 100% case of schizophrenia prevention, no risk, no years of worrying about "what if something happens to our child despite all our precautions and it happens?"
I feel like Gattaca hits on the moral counter argument pretty well here. Choosing "who" is born to this extent could create an artificial and higher bar of expectations. It could untether society's expectations of the individual more than they already are.
Eventually, having a normal birth becomes "immoral" because the quality of life for a randomly born baby is that much lower than for a genetically selected baby. Not because of the baby, but because of society (e.g. the theme of prior posts on perspectives towards disability). Who is "able" enough for society? Genetic selection would take it to a whole new level.
If that happens, then what is the point of normal birth and what does it mean to be human?
I think if you look at it from the 40k foot view, that "higher standard" is an ineluctable good thing - what does "the human race is progressing and becoming better" mean *except* that?
For the human race overall to improve and expand in capabilities and choices, a higher standard is an inevitable consequence, and is a sign that good things are happening, and in this case, it's happening in the best way, from individual choices on the parts of the parents concerned.
Would you chain humanity to today's average IQ and today's disease and suicide susceptibilities for all time?? Of course not, that's needlessly killing millions or billions over deep time, for literally no benefit.
I'm claiming "the human race progressing and becoming better" is a good thing, but that's certainly a bit of definitional fiat, because it's literally in the sentence.
But I'm pointing out that there are many non-good things about current humanity (viz disease and suicide susceptibilities, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc), and that the road to ameliorating those bad things is going to inevitably raise the standard of human comparison, and that raised standard is a sign that those good things are happening.
>the road to ameliorating those bad things is going to inevitably raise the standard of human comparison, and that raised standard is a sign that those good things are happening.
Agreed. To pick an example that has gone essentially to completion:
"Scurvy crew" is a linguistic fossil _because_ vitamin C was discovered and made widely available. That's good, raised bar notwithstanding!
Yeah so... good and bad are subjective. Your comment present a bit of a false dichotomy for human progress through that black and white lens. The easiest way to deconstruct that is by noting that both people who support effective altruistm and people who support genocide will say that it is "making the human race better".
I agree that change does happen and I don't take a subjective stance of the "goodness" of technology prior to comprehensive real world evidence to its benefit. And even them, I am skeptical because I have worked in a data and resaerch and I understand that knowledge is not almighty.
Technological determinism has been the driving force for a few millenia rather than the human experience. Genetic selection using IVF under the guise of goodness is, at its core, no different than prior iterations of selecting a preferred human. The difference is the technology and the framing and its use. Many will say this "will only be used responsibly". That's the biggest red flag of TD because it's a claim that can't be guaranteed. Tesla "autopilot", AI, and plastic surgery are just a few examples.
"Eventually, having a normal birth becomes "immoral" because the quality of life for a randomly born baby is that much lower than for a genetically selected baby"
Given how expensive and labor intensive it is compared to just having sex, it does not seem possible for IVF to replace sex as the main method of reproduction in the near or even medium term future.
But granting the premise, assuming that IVF and polygenic selection become affordable and/or subsidized, sure that is how society works. It is immoral nowadays to deprive a child an education, or drink while pregnant, or deny a child medical care. It wasn't in the past, but now standards have changed.
The intent of my comment is to provide a longitudinal perspective that Gattaca provides a lens into. Yes IVF is pricey, but technology still gets adopted and cheaper over time. There is a huge volume of annual fertility treatment already. The situation is far larger and less isolated than a pair of parents who decide to not have a kid with schizophrenia. People are often vapid, shallow, and follow trends. e.g. Plastic surgery was meant to reconstruct people and now it deconstructs them too, we don't want this technology to follow a similar path.
Note 1: I am not in the ART world and don't know if these pricing are an apt comparison. If I'm wrong, I get the feeling that it has gotten cheaper than I'm confident to claim.
Note 2: Sometimes prices don't change, but costs do. Subsidies, insurance, and payment plans can all increase affordability and prevalence of a system
It's too much of a stretch to call it a strawman when it's what actually happens in the movie. It's the main conflict of the main plot! It's what the creators picked to focus on, however ridiculous that choice may've been! It's hardly anyone else's fault that you picked it as your argument despite it working against your position (and despite being Evidence From Fiction).
You were wrong, and you were curtly dismissive about it. Do better.
Look, OP used the premise of the movie in comparison to present day society (with a cheeky presentation as well) which distracts from the intention and story that Gattaca intends to communicate. It responds without actually responding to the argument that is being presented.
OP may fall into the class of people who didn't really get Gattaca or thought it was more utopian than dystopian, everything is open to interpretation and that's fine. I am here to discuss. OP did not expand the discussion.
And you did not expand the discussion either. And then you ended your point saying "You were wrong". Oy vey. Do better?
My high school biology teacher showed Gattaca to my class in the late 2000s. It's a perfect example of a movie that demonstrates the exact opposite of what the filmmakers were going for.
My husband and I just had some embryos frozen. The fact that this level of genetic screening exists at all just blows me away. Never did my 14-year-old self expect that the field would progress so fast that *I* would be using it, only ~15 years later.
While we were going through this months-long process, I sometimes doubted myself: "Should we really do this? It's a lot of money. This could pay for a lot of daycare..."
And then I'd just remember the IVF scene from Gattaca, and I'd be like, "Yes. Yes, we're doing this."
I agree, most people that I watched Gattaca with didn't grasp the concept of "being human is no longer valued" that the movie themes on and how society is constantly defining who is "abled" and "valued" in society. When we discussed, they saw it as a story of personal triumph, of overcoming, of relentless determination of the protagonist against all odds, in a future that had evolved so well that it didn't need that. They didn't see the flipside of the coin, like the "perfect" astronaut who is replaced secretly after their leg injury makes them literally invalid in society. They rely on the protagonist to fill in their shoes so that their name and career can live on, so that they can have a place in society. The reality is that a society that picks who enters it, never truly accepts anyone. Sad
Congrats on your IVF treatment! It sounds like it went well?
I know right now IVF is still expensive and restricted to what are typically highly intentional, loving couples with resources available to them. As technology becomes cheaper and more widely accessible the ideal use cases tend to become unideal use cases, and this is where my primary concern lies. The longitudinal potential of this to create a society that accepts no one at baseline... non-trivial to me. Human perfectionism is more of a curse than a blessing, in my personal opinion.
When we say "life begins at conception", doesn't that mean the actual person does not exist until the sperm enters the egg? If we endow an unfertilized egg with personhood it seems we are complicating matters quite a bit.
There’s a whole philosophical literature on the “non-identity problem”. Some of it is stupid, some of it is great, but if one is interested in seeing what people have already said about this, to see if some of their ideas seem like meaningful insights: https://philpapers.org/s/non-identity%20problem
I can try to steelman the anti-screening (for whatever) argument like this: first, the pro-screening side can hypothetically respond with "tough luck, go be born to someone else", to which the anti-screening side says that, aha, but if everyone in the society does the screening, there's no parents left to be born to.
It's one thing to be one of the millions of eggs and trillions of sperms who didn't win the lottery. All your examples replace a would-be winner with another more or less random candidate, then pump the intuition that the former winner was chosen randomly anyway, and with astronomically low odds, so they don't get to complain as if they were robbed of their predestined birthright.
It's another thing when the lottery is rigged to give entire categories of embryos essentially zero chance to be born. In this case, better luck next time doesn't work, luck won't help, and that feels kind of unfair.
I personally don't approve of this way of thinking because I don't think that nonexistent humans have rights, but I suspect that most opponents are reaching for something like this intuition and you have to state and address it.
There's also people like Kevin Bird who say that saying that some traits are undesirable in embryos implies that they are undesirable in existing humans, so even if we double dog swear that we are not forcefully euthanizing existing humans, their feelings are still hurt and protecting them is worth creating lots and lots of real suffering. I disagree with that in strongest possible terms.
I personally have never understood how *so many* rationalists are strongly anti-eugenics.
Eugenics is one of the strongest "net positives" available to us, to the extent that literally *everybody* practices it strenuously, to basically the level of tech available today.
If Greg Clark's The Son Also Rises taught us anything, it's that assortative mating among elites is one of the strongest possibly optimized things that people do. For those effects to be true, assortative mating has to be one of the most important and most optimized choices people make - and indeed, if you look at the world, elite people are *extremely* selective about who they have children with.
To a first approximation, Rationalists are elites, by pay and by IQ, and by occupations. And everyone in our circles optimizes hard on the quality of their mates - what is this, but eugenics?
I don't understand why when you suddenly use some science to go a bit farther, it's suddenly verboten to most people here. You already spent *decades* trying to optimize this to the n-th degree!
The only objection that I've heard that isn't ad hominem (Nazi's did it isn't a real objection, particularly when literally everyone everywhere for all time strenuously optimizes mate quality), is that there can be unintended effects due to the complexity, or that only rich people will do it and this will lead to greater societal stratification and literal castes.
First, these are contradictory - if only rich people are doing it, the sample and the people affected is low enough that we can't really mess things up with unintended consequences.
Second, the rich ALREADY socially stratify, and are basically a caste! That's what The Son Also Rises is *about!*. It's been true for thousands of years!
And finally, there's literally no path for "regular" people to get to a place where they can polygenically select away genetic defects and select into any benefits UNLESS you go through early adopters, ie the rich.
Going to a consequentialist perspective, economic growth is the strongest lever and driver for eliminating poverty worldwide, and we will eventually be able to select on those things that will enable the elimination of poverty worldwide, ie IQ and conscientiousness.
The fact that somewhere along the way people will also be able to make their kids blonde and tall and healthy and strong and attractive as well (horrors! Aryan master race stuff!) is totally a personal choice for those parents, and is a GOOD thing.
From whatever perspective you come from, be it the individual parents' rights and choices, or from society's, or from the perspective of eliminating poverty and building a better future for the human race, polygenic selection is going to be one of the biggest levers we have to allow more choice, better societies, and less poverty. Why would we discard this tool, just because Nazi's did it in a really poor and biased way in the past?
Hahaha! Good show. But yes, one among a couple of topics that I disagree with the dominant hive mind on that merit the nominative moniker.
I always find it an odd experience being the iconoclast or outside thinker within our circles, because in normie circles we're usually iconoclasts for being Rationalists!
Oh, I thought the main post was a bit where you reiterated bog standard lesswrong rationalist positions, and the humor was that acx commentators were, in fact, not rationalists.
Also gwern did a fairly detailed cost benefit calculation on gamete selection, including testing it on variations of selection (see: https://gwern.net/embryo-selection)
So this originating comment really seemed like someone entering a Taylor Swift concert and claiming that no one in sight heard any of her songs.
Oh, I definitely don't see it as a standard rationalist position overall or even in this comment thread. Has there been a survey indicating that it's a rough consensus? Was it a question on the SSC survey?
Certainly, I think some Rationalists, including relatively prominent ones like Scott and Gwern, are pro gengineering and embryo selection, and pro making conscious decisions to try to foster desired traits in the next generation (which I see as basically the definition of eugenics). Ives Parr commenting here has a pretty nice substack entirely devoted to the idea!
But isn't most of this 400 strong comment thread the proof that a substantial fraction, maybe even a majority, think that gengineering and embryo selection might be morally wrong, and is certainly questionable if not outright wrong? If I paraphrased what I see as the rat-sphere consensus on those two things, I'd say it's something like "there's a high potential for second-order problems and unknown unknowns, and we should move slowly and enact stringent regulation when this becomes possible."
When, for example, there's no regulations on who can have children with whom, or parenting styles or techniques, or anything like that, because in theory we feel it's a matter of individual choice and liberty. And given it's a slowly advancing technology that will only be available to a tiny subset of rich early adopters at first and for a decent while, moving slowly and having unanticipated side effects capped in impact is going to happen regardless. And yet all these people want to jump ahead and regulate what those rich early adopters can do!
I would also think given the (more consensus and agreed upon, IMO) AI risk attitudes in the rat-sphere, we'd want to move on this as *quickly* as possible, because raising the baseline for human capability and performance is probably one of the best things you can do when working on an extremely difficult problem that can affect our entire species and future light cone negatively.
I find it funny, and wanted to point out the mismatch, between people (including rationalists) doing basically everything they can to optimize mate quality, parenting, education, status, and whatever benefits-to-offspring they can enable to the n-th degree, which is explicitly eugenic and which everyone has been effortfully doing for a quarter million years, but then wanting to slow down and start regulating (other people, not themselves) when technology shows the first hint of making some additional baby-steps of progress on that front.
There's a bit of a crabs-in-a-bucket dynamic I'm seeing - you don't think the rich, educated, early adopters are going to be as thoughtful and effortful as, oh, you and basically every elite in history, when they're setting out to optimize their progeny? They need regulation specifying what they can and can't do? Apparently so.
Not a rationalist, but we've discussed eugenics on here before and I dived into pre-Nazi eugenicist promotion (so hoping to avoid the 'just because the Nazis did it, that tainted eugenics, that's unfair way to consider the topic and besides the Nazis didn't do proper eugenics' reaction).
Pretty much all the big names in eugenics were gung-ho for "family members, especially parents, decide who you marry; you marry based on best breeding outcome; ideal society grades everyone on a range of areas and you get to marry and reproduce based on your total score for best eugenic outcome; what do we do with the unfit, well that ranges from 'humane sterilisation' to 'do away with them but we're vague on this because bleeding-hearts would be outraged'".
It wasn't any happy "it's totally the decision of the persons involved as to how many and what kind of kids they have" ideal for the eugenicists, who were anticipating having local Eugenics Societies keeping records on *everyone* and making sure the 'unfit' didn't breed. Love? Sex? Pshaw, foolish notions, we'll rely on women being the sexual gatekeepers and make sure mothers influence their daughters not to even give the time of day to the low-scoring young man.
I think eugenics as a concept has always had two sides - positive eugenics, in terms of optimizing the quality of mates, and negative eugenics, in terms of preventing undesirables from breeding.
Any arguments for gengineering or embryo selection is definitionally only concerned with positive eugenics, and the individual choice and liberty of the parents making the choices.
Negative eugenics has basically always been a non-starter for liberal democracies, particularly since the Nazi's made it their own and forever tainted it. But even if Nazi's had never existed, most liberal democracies aren't going to vote that 50%+ of the voting populace can't reproduce, or vote for parenting licences or criteria, anyways, for pretty obvious reasons.
This leaves positive eugenics, which is now, and basically always has been, in full force. I'd even argue that the selection pressures and effects have been increasing with time, and with fewer and fewer unintended children born each year. My biggest source of confoundment is how rigorously people try to optimize positive eugenics without calling it that - mate quality, education, status, peer groups, any other advantages we can give to our kids - but then how strenuously the average person seems to be against any technologically-mediated baby steps along the same path.
>Pshaw, foolish notions, we'll rely on women being the sexual gatekeepers and make sure mothers influence their daughters not to even give the time of day to the low-scoring young man.
I mean, hasn't this basically happened, but at the individual level? Isn't this the cri de coer of so many men on dating apps, that it's impossible for a low-scoring man to get past the sexual gatekeeping?
Our big mistake from a eugenics perspective is probably optimizing *too hard.* The bottomless seas of dating apps deceive people into thinking they can achieve a higher quality of long term match than they really can, and combined with longer educational and career-launching periods, basically trap people into not making mate and child-having decisions until it's too late, thus our impaired elite fertility across the Western world.
Gengineering and embryo selection will almost certainly further impair elite fertility at first - just imagine, now you not only have to spend decades trying to find the appropriate-gender ubermensch worth having a kid with, but THEN you can only have a kid when you're willing to drop $500k a pop (or whatever), because otherwise they won't be competitive with the "6' 6" olympic-medaling von Neumann adonis" minimum standard that Harvard requires now! And what's the *point* of even having kids if they're not globe-straddling colossi in every field of endeavor??
"Any arguments for gengineering or embryo selection is definitionally only concerned with positive eugenics, and the individual choice and liberty of the parents making the choices."
It starts out like that, but always veers towards "and while we're at it, what about all these undesirables having hordes of brats? that's terrible for society! all that misery, poverty and crime continuing on, generation after generation!"
Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" showed the superior (positive eugenics results) people being tired of trying to hold society together and provide for all the millions of morons (the negative eugenics results), so they needed a solution. And they got one, from a cryogenically frozen 20th century man they thawed out. And that result was to kill off all the morons. The superiors didn't *like* it, but they went along with it, because well, what other choice was there? Not enough smart people, too many dumb people.
Positive eugenics, even at its most benign, does include negative eugenics: we choose to implant this embryo instead of that embryo, because that embryo has negative traits (e.g. genes for disease). Then it becomes that embryo lacks desired traits (will not be as smart, tall, blond(e), you pick which). And probably some sort of regulations around "even if IVF and polygenic screening is available for all, if you are one of the underclass we are not going to help you reproduce. We may not ban you, but we won't make it easier and cheaper for you to have those kids with the low IQ and tendency to be shiftless wastrels".
Nobody is going to think of themselves as a Nazi for supporting negative eugenics, because it's not like we're rounding the deplorables up into concentration camps, is it? We just don't want them having kids and carrying forward that criminal dumb lineage into the future where our smart, positive eugenics screened kids, will be living. Just a couple or three generations, and silently and without fuss the undesirables will fade out of existence.
One non-ad-hominem concern beyond those that you've cited is that there are a few parameters, most notably height, which can spark an arms race that benefits no one. This has been cited by several commenters in the overall discussion.
>Eugenics is one of the strongest "net positives" available to us
I'm skeptical, mostly due to speed. From zygote to Ph.D. is around a quarter century. My best guess is that even if we had perfect embryo selection for exactly the right criteria applied right now to the next generation of kids, by the time they got through their education I expect AIs will probably be well beyond the human range (though, of course, this may fail).
This comment section is basically a handful of contrarians arguing with everyone else. I've had an overwhelmingly pro-genetic screening experience in this comment section. I would estimate the number of anti-embryo-selection commenters here at less than ten individuals.
Scott wrote this post mostly to address the "bioethicists over the hill" who want to ban polygenic screening. It's not really directed at Rationalists, or even a majority of this readership. We're pretty much all on the same page, here.
you wrote "somewhere along the way people will also be able to make their kids blonde and tall and healthy and strong and attractive as well (horrors! Aryan master race stuff!) is totally a personal choice for those parents, and is a GOOD thing."
- Exactly! There is really *nothing wrong* with being pretty, smart and strong!
While I have the same moral intuitions as you on the replace vs. cure question, I don't think any of these examples address the objections people brought up in your last post. Fetal alcohol syndrome and child abuse are different from schizophrenia in ways that make your side of the argument a lot easier.
First, they aren't genetic. That lets you sidestep any argument that embryo selection = eugenics, or will inevitably lead to genetics. Second, they don't serve any valuable social function, not even an evo-psych handwave in the direction of one. That gets you around the Chesterton's fence-style objections to deleting parts of the human genome.
I would suggest redoing your situation 3 experiment with, say, autism as the condition to be avoided. If a world without autism gives you a different gut reaction than a world without child abuse, that would get you a little closer to understanding the other side of this argument.
Decisions are not made in an abstract, timeless way. Every decision is made at a specific point in time, based on the information that is available at that point.
In our particular scenario, the mother-to-be does not have the choice between being pregnant with a child conceived in the past when she was drinking, and one conceived in the future when she has stopped---not unless she's already pregnant and is considering abortion! Her choice is to get pregnant in the future while drinking, and to get pregnant in the future while not drinking. And the characteristics of either fertilized ovum are unknown; whatever she might assume about one she can just as well assume about the other.
Open question: do you think increasing human intelligence (either at the mean or on the margin), through IVF for instance, increases the risk of human catastrophe (I'm thinking from AI) or decreases it, on net?
The objection is that gene-related issues are sensitive and you are supposed to be vague when talking about them. If you are clear and straightforward about it you violate the shroud of indeterminance to which they become attached. It forces their mind to come to conclusions they may not appreciate (which they project unto the breaker of the shroud) It could be considered psychic violence
I think the major objection to PGT-P is that it isn't ready for prime-time yet. We don't know the genes that cause schizophrenia and like most complex diseases, it's likely to be many genes. The data that current associations are based on are also flawed. Also, it's unlikely that there would be much variation in risk in a small cohort of embryos to be clinically significant (my understanding is that you need hundreds before you start to see huge differences). And you may be inadvertently selecting against some beneficial trait. Having said that, if the patient has been adequately counseled and is already doing IVF for infertility reasons and wants to do PGT-P, I think they should be able to. But at this point, I personally would not recommend someone do IVF just to do PGT-P.
The problem people seem to be gesturing at is a slightly more difficult one than you seem to acknowledge, although I generally agree that these “isolated demands for rigor” are a sign of bad faith.
The problem is the question of the rights of future people, which plagues many ethical theories, but most notoriously utilitatianism in the “repugnant conclusion” thought experiment.
It seems wrong to cause harm to occur to future people, and good to cause good things to occur to future generations. Doing good/preventing harm to currently living people is straightforward, and can in most circumstances be done consensually, since the people are alive to be consulted.
But we can’t ask future generations for permission to make modifications to their lives that we currently find desireable. Furthermore, there are questions of individualism that are not easy to answer. Can we do harm to specific future people to help the average future person? How do we deal with future people as individuals?
I think many people intuitively respond to this problem complex by leaning into passivity. It’s acceptable to passively jostle sperm because the outcome is random and unavoidable. It’s unacceptable to actively select for certain traits (say, controversially, lighter skin color) because this cannot be done without asking permission, which is unavoidable. It’s a sort of ethical default preference, or maybe a version of the naturalistic fallacy.
That said, no person or ethical theorist gets out of the problem of future people looking particularly good, so I find it hard to criticize these sorts of intuitions too much. I simply don’t share them.
When you say "the anti-abortionist doesn’t have much of a case here" (you start 'Even if', but I think the logic of your paragraph is that you don't think they have much of a case) I think you mean "they don't have much of a case outside of their general case against IVF"? You seem to me to have shown that they do have a case in total.
I find utilitarianism unsatisfactory on a number of different grounds, both epistemic and ethical. But the one that's most relevant here is that it supposes we can define a utility function for an individual human being; that is, that given any two options to choose between, we can assign each a utility score, and then the better choice for that human being is the one that attains the higher utility score---in the classic wording, the one that provides the "greatest happiness." And I simply don't believe that human brains work that way. I think that there are domains within which different values are compared regularly with each other, and thus are commensurable, and we can say that one is favored over the other; but I think there are also cases where we have to choose between values that fall into different domains, in which we do not have an established ranking, and do not even have a procedure for arriving at such a ranking. That is, I think human beings do not have global utility functions. And the choice between values that fall into different domains is inherently hard, and may be painful, as in the classic conundrum of "should I betray my country or betray my friend?" The kind of purely calculational ethics that utilitarianism offers excludes the possibility of tragedy.
And I think that, in the first place, one of the merits of virtue ethics is that the virtues it recommends may stand us in good stead in the face of tragedy, enabling us to make good choices when nothing approximating utilitarian calculation is any help. And in the second place, if we are to have any method for making choices that is generally applicable of helpful in such difficulties, that method most closely approximates the creation of works of art. And while there certainly can be a rational and even calculating aspect to art, the kind of synthesis that it calls for takes place on a different level than simple calculation; and the same may apply to the kind of synthesis that we perform when we try to lead an ethical life.
My perspective is as a lawyer, law professor, and grandparent of a lovely girl born as the result of implantation of a donated embryo. I'm sure that colors my understanding - in particular, I appreciate something that is not mentioned in any of the news coverage I've seen, which is the generosity of couples donating embryos to infertile couples, so that the embryos and the families of those couples can get the benefit of having children.
It should surprise no one that the media's presentation of the decision is inaccurate. The majority held that fertilized embryos are covered by a state statute making compensable injuries to children by including in the definition of a child a fertilized embryo. (The various judges, and the dissent in particular, have a lot to say about whether that is a reasonable interpretation of a statute passed in the 19th century long before IVF was possible. That's a hotly contested question and the majority and dissent are both worth reading on the issue.)
The facts of the case are that a clinic - in what appears to be at the least a negligent way -- allowed someone to wander into its storage area and destroy some embryos by removing them from the cold storage and drop them on the floor. Certainly this clinic should be liable to the parents. The court had to decide whether it would be liable for damaging the parents' property, violating its contractual obligations to the parents, or in tort for injury to a child. It went with the latter. There are good arguments (made by the various opinions) for and against the majority's decision, but the majority's interpretation of the statute isn't the result of backwoods judges doing crazy stuff. It's a plausible interpretation of the statute. (There is an odd concurrence by the Chief Justice that delves deeply into theology in search of the meaning of "sanctity of life" - that one isn't (to my ears) really a legal argument but it also isn't the majority opinion and so isn't what drove the result.)
Clinics are upset (tort damages are more than property or contract damages would be). They are hoping to get the AL (and other states') legislature to amend the law to give them protection from such suits. One good way to launch that campaign is to try to frame the decision as anti-IVF and portray themselves as the good guys helping infertile couples. This clinic, however, was not the good guy - it was (at a minimum) pretty careless in protecting the embryos from people wandering around its facility. (Door locks are not high tech! Freezer locks aren't either!)
Reasonable people can differ about whether the court got the statutory interpretation question right (and the members of the court do). But this isn't a decision that will end IVF treatments in AL by imposing an intolerable burden on clinics - and it doesn't seem reasonable to me for the clinics to have stopped IVF treatments in response to it, so long as they were behaving non-negligently in their creation, storage, and implantation of the embryos.
I'm going to be a cynic here, and say that the opposition to the court decision and the painting of the court as a bunch of dumb Alabama hick rednecks has to do with abortion.
After all, if you classify these embryos as children and that they have rights which can be injured and you can be held liable for harm done to them - that's pretty bad for the pro-choice rationale that embryos are only clumps of cells, potential but not actual humans, have no rights, and are the property of the mother whose choice alone makes them either a baby or not, and whose rights outweigh those.
You're not supposed to kill children, but if embryos aren't children, then abortion is okay. If embryos are held to be legally children, then you're ceding all this ground to the ignorant pro-lifers and that means untold thousands of deaths by forced pregnancy of raped ten year olds who die in childbirth (that's a real argument I saw online about 'if Trump wins the election', by the way).
I think that "social policy decisions" are a different case from what's outlined in the trolley problem. In the specific case of five versus one, you can see the five people, you can see the one person, and you are deciding that that specific one person must die to spare the lives of the others. In a social policy decision, you inherently cannot identify the people who will be made worse off, or how much worse off they will be made; you are deciding between probabilities of distributing damage in various ways through a large population, with the consequences for any one person not fully knowable in advance, and the consequences for every one person in the population impossible to know in advance. I don't see that intuitions that are developed in the one situation can meaningfully generalize to the other.
Another thought is related to trolley problem reasoning. How interchangeable are lives. How much work can yiu put into casting the role of "this couple's first child" before its a different person?
The only slightly reasonable objection I have heard for not selectively aborting down syndrome-fetuses is the following: If we like diversity, someone have to pay the cost for making the world more divers, ie having kids with downs syndrome even though it is probably more work than having kids without such syndrome. (This is btw also predicated on the sort of empirically testable hypothesis that people with downs doesnt suffer a lot more than healthy people. I have heard that this is true and that they even report higher happiness in surveys. At least i societies and times that doesnt hide and/or torture them.)
Even if I grant this argument it comes out more like a coordination-problem: How do we make people committ to keeping downs-fetuses and having downs-kids? It does not make ME want to parent a child with downs syndrome myself. (I have three healthy kids. Maybe one with downs is better than zero.)
Then again, the norm that we shouldnt selectively abort children can be seen as exactly the coordination-function we would need to get more diversity, to the cost of the parents who get the "diverse" kids.
I think talking about this as though it's a given is incorrect. As Scott mentioned - it's about low risk and high risk. So it's not a matter of choosing schizophrenia or not choosing it. It's a matter of how much you want.
"Would you tell an embryo-selected person to their face that you would rather they not exist?"
This analogy lacks important symmetry, and I suspect was made as a weak additional argument to make it seem like overwhelming force in favor of the position. Cf. Proving Too much SSC, 2013.
A general principle is that the method used to make something is different from what is made. I can object to brownies from an Easy-bake-Oven. But that objection is categorically different from objecting to 12 inch pecan brownies. Even though the method constrains what can be made - eg. Easy bake ovens are small - that is not the same as objecting to what is made.
It seems like the "rational" way to discuss this topic is something like "sure, religious nuts (wrongly) think life begins at conception, so they hate the implied murders, and sure, dumb emotional people feel icky about eliminating difficult conditions like schizophrenia due to misplaced sympathy for existing schizophrenics. But once you get past these silly objections, this is obviously good."
But I think a majority of people have similar intuition (something like: yikes) when they learn about this procedure, and I think that intuition is due to some real, albeit hard to pin down or summarize, potential problems. In fact, the wide range of negative possibilities is potentially one of the greatest arguments against this type of screening.
For example, it's really easy for me to think of "harmless" but ethically messy examples. Should it be legal to screen based on skin tone? Should it be legal to screen out harmful skin conditions which are statistically associated with specific skin tone ranges? How many "individual couples just choosing their preference" would we allow to screen out e.g. dark skin before it's comparable to a type of ethnic cleansing? This isn't hypothetical; there are absolutely diseases which occur mainly or only among certain ethnicities. Eliminating such diseases may reduce the prevalence of a bunch of related ethnic traits. If a multiethnic couple share a preference for e.g. the Irish husband's physical looks over the Asian wife's physical looks, does society have an obligation to prevent such a decision?
Should it be legal to screen based on probable political views? How about religiosity, or likely preference for a specific religion? Are we comfortable if eliminating disease also unexpectedly eliminates red hair, or wide noses, or freckles? Or what about the Belyaev fox experiment? Selecting foxes for personality traits surprisingly changed the physical makeup of the resulting population. It's not hard to imagine the reverse happening to humans, whereby we reduce genetic variance to eliminate disease and accidentally reduce positive personality traits.
It's also easy to picture not-far-away dystopias resulting from the widespread use of such screening. None of these seem easy to prevent except by luck:
- An entire generation shares a preference for e.g. tallness, and then a pandemic which kills in proportion to height is extra deadly.
- A government notices a connection between e.g. pliability and some disease, then hides the connection and enforces elimination of the disease "for the greater good".
- A perverted doctor/scientist/intern (whoever is in charge of this selection procedure) gives hundreds of families the sickest possible children, and no one notices for years.
- A temporary cultural fad is pro-[insert obviously negative trait or disease], and a generation of children struggles to survive their shared condition.
- A strange upper limit on IQ is reached whereupon social norms warp in an unexpected and dangerous way.
- New types of negative biases emerge toward people born "unchosen".
- Humanity almost entirely screens out a trait. Too late, we realize how much we depend on it.
Not sure, look at all the people who are against polygenic screening even in the comments section of this blog heavily selected for utilitarian technophiles.
I agree that if polygenic screening becomes popular, ten years after it's popular everyone (except Alabama judges) will agree that it's good. But I also think it could just get banned before anyone has a chance to have Near Mode opinions on it, or that clinics might just not offer it because it's too weird/creepy, or it might take twenty years longer to catch on than it should. There are definitely people who are already trying to ban it.
I'm also concerned that in a little while it will become easier to polygenically select psychological traits (IQ, niceness, etc), and this will provoke a big enough backlash that people will ban *all* polygenic screening (which tbh will be necessary because it will be pretty hard to allow some kinds but not others).
My only objection — and I am, in fact, being serious here, although I also know it's ultimately a silly concern — is that a large part of my identity comes from "I am a lot smarter than most", and a good chunk after that from stuff like "I am tall" and "I have rare green eyes" and so forth...
...so if it starts to become the case that my IQ is no longer real unusual, and my height becomes average or (God forbid) below-average, and people start picking green eyes for tons of kids... what am I even but an inferior and common fossil?!
[shivers]
It's a joke, but it's also a real problem. If everybody is now guaranteed 120 IQ, that becomes the new "90 IQ normie idiot" and now being smart is 160 IQ, so you pop along to the polygenic selection clinic to make sure Junior is hitting that level.
I know people will say "but what's wrong with a society of geniuses?", what I want them to think about is "what constitutes 'genius' and what if you can't hit the new requirement?" I think inequality and hierarchy, even informal, will still persist even with polygenic superbabies ("poor Todd, he can't even cook a Michelin three star meal while balancing blindfolded on a highwire over Niagara Falls and simultaneously composing an opera while solving the insoluble equations of 2120, why he's not even seven foot nine in height and he's already fourteen years of age!")
Being at the bottom of the hierarchy is still better in a society of material plenty than one of paucity. And that's before you consider that the benefits of being smart and capable aren't entirely about your positioning relative to other people. In a society wherein I am the dumbest of the dumb, I'm still able to read and write, and this is good for its own sake and I would choose this over being top banana in society of proto-humans where I was a razor-wit shaman for being able to build a fire (the pinnacle of tech).
Well, on the plus side, it would probably get easier to organise board game nights.
"which tbh will be necessary because it will be pretty hard to allow some kinds but not others"
Why couldn't you write a law saying that polygenic screening companies are allowed to disclose information about A, but not information about B?
I understand this in the context of the child's sex - it's probably correlated with so many other things that you couldn't really redact it. But other things seem bannable.
Interestingly, in China, doctors are not allowed to tell the sex of the fetus, because a very large proportion would choose boy and heavily skew the population.
(The law was passed three decades ago when the country implemented the rigid one-child policy as many families hoped their only child would be a boy because of sexist traditional preferences.)
So really, in specific contexts, it's bannable (but people will still seek the information in illegal ways, no moral judgment here)
>(except Alabama judges)
And journalists!
I've whined on here before about the fertility clinic offering "choose your baby's eye colour!" as part of their options package, so I think that horse has already left the stable. If it's legal, and you can make money out of it, it's going to happen. 'We only intended to wipe out schizophrenia, we never meant to create Protestant Heaven!'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4IletJ7-Tw
Well, maybe picking 'tall, smiley, will get into a good university' may be way easier than 'nicer, smarter, mentally healthier, will not invent way to soak billions out of the gullible via appeals to think of the children'.
In case 1, I don't think you're making the relevant comparison. The question is not of the child the woman would have had before she stopped drinking versus the child she has after she stopped drinking; it's of the child she has after she stopped drinking versus how that same child might have turned out had she not stopped drinking. We're not comparing past and present, but two different possible presents.
I agree. Scott says, "In common language, we would say that the doctor’s intervention prevented the baby from getting fetal alcohol syndrome." No, we wouldn't. Because when we say 'the baby' we mean one particular baby. The common language way of describing what happened would be that the doctor's intervention prevented the woman from having an FAS baby. Notice that in that sentence we say *the* woman, because we are talking about that one particular alcoholic woman, but we say *an* alcoholic baby, because we are not talking about a particular baby, but just whatever baby this woman has while still drinking.
If someone said to me "the doctor's treatment prevented the baby from getting FAS" I would take them to be talking about some one, particular baby, not an abstract "future child of this woman". I would assume that they meant that there was some drug or other treatment administered when *the* baby was in utero that somehow protected it from the damage alcohol in the woman's system would have otherwise caused.
She never would have had that same child if she didn't stop drinking, because she'd get pregnant earlier.
That doesn't seem to follow. Here is the woman who has not yet stopped drinking, AND has not gotten pregnant, because if she had, she would hardly be asking, "Should I stop drinking before I become pregnant?" The comparison is between (a) the hypothetical future child that she may conceive after she stops drinking and (b) the hypothetical future child that she may conceive while continuing to drink. Neither child has any more identity than that when she is making the decision. There isn't an actually existing Child of Alcohol or an actually existing Child of Sobriety; there is no chromosomal makeup for either of them, no specific sperm or ovum, not even a specific date of conception for either. So any reasoning that turns on the idea of either of them having a specific identity that goes beyond "conceived sometime in the future of this moment" is making assumptions that were not in the problem as stated.
This is the anti-abortion perspective covered in the last paragraph where the physical instantiation of the fertilized egg gives it rights. The cases are argued from a perspective that intent to have, unfertilized egg, fertilized egg, sperm, have similar moral standing.
Believing a fertilized egg has a right not to be killed makes IVF abhorrent and preempts any objection to the nature of how an surviving egg is selected
"The cases are argued from a perspective that intent to have, unfertilized egg, fertilized egg, sperm, have similar moral standing"
On the anti-abortion side? I've seen the strawman that "you lot believe sperm and eggs are sacred, so why don't you have burials for menstrual pads, that's an egg!" but I didn't expect to see it voiced here as "this is what the anti-abortion set believe".
No. Sperm and unfertilised eggs? Human cells but like blood cells. Not a separate being.
Intending to get pregnant? Good for you, but that's not the same as being pregnant.
Fertilised egg: beginning of separate human life, separate being. This does have moral standing.
IVF? Bringing embryos into existence, then discarding them, or keeping them frozen indefinitely awaiting discarding, or if the implantation is too successful and all the embryos develop, advising the mother to have a selective abortion. Not a good procedure.
Not all anti-abortion/pro-life people have the same views on IVF, by the way.
The hypothetical woman specifically weaned off drinking over a few months to make sure that in this example it's unambiguously a different egg than would have been fertilized had she not gone to the doctor
But there are also many other things she could have done that also would have resulted in her having that same second baby, but without getting sober in between. In this example, there are two separable steps - having a different baby, and preventing it from getting fetal alcohol syndrom - that are simply correlated. With IVF, the fact that you have a different baby *is* what prevents schizophrenia.
The situations are identical, materially, but the intentions are different.
It's a little like arguing whether one of the Twin Towers struck on 9-11 might have actually been a legitimate military target since the CIA had an office there, even if Bin Ladin had no idea about that office when planning the strike. (Though Bin Ladin would still have needed to issue a warning prior to the attack to allow evacuation.) Are we looking at Virtue Ethics vs Utilitarianism, maybe? Applications of virtue ethics which deliver problematic utilitarian outcomes often looks illogical to me. Even if so, Scotts other examples seem to address the matter.
I've never been impressed by the logic of utilitarianism; I'm inclined to say that if virtue ethics leads to outcomes that utilitarianism rejects, so much the worse for utilitarianism.
Even if we ignore the thing about that she'd have a kid earlier, any change would result in different sperm getting there because of chaos. Even if we look at the case where she's already pregnant and deciding to stop drinking, sure the resulting child has the same DNA, but you can say the same of identical twins. They're not the same person, are they? So could you really say that the baby with fetal alcohol syndrome and the one without are the same person?
I'm not sure you're following Scott's argument
The 'irrrelevant comparison' is the comparison that Scott is criticizing, and quite fairly, that he believes other people are explicitly making in regards to polygenic screening. The 'relevant comparison' is the comparison that Scott is arguing in favor of.
I think you’re choosing to privilege the variable of time, without explaining why that’s more relevant than ignoring it
I honestly do not understand how anyone can object to this. Sure, there are your religious pro-life people with the "god maybe wanted you to have that schizophrenic baby," given their complete lack of empathy for women carrying issue doomed to die shortly after birth, but preventing human suffering, if possible, is a net good.
I think you're perhaps a little harsh on the pro-lifers, but I'm not certain so I won't address that. And, frankly, I'm not one myself so I might distort things if I tried.
I'm also not going to get into the people who oppose this (at least for mental traits) because they believe that genes do not and *must* not have large influence on the mind (due to Marxist/egalitarian/anti-racist ideology), and building technology on the premise that such large influence exists is therefore in their minds futile, blasphemous, and if successful a proof-by-pudding that their worldview is flawed. I will merely note that these people exist, and move on.
So, let's come at this from a secular conservative point of view; we accept that it will have effect, we don't consider it inherently immoral, we're just worried about unintended consequences. And here, we run into the problem that humans do *not* come with blueprints. Natural selection might have designed us, but it didn't give us a cheat-sheet on why things are set the way they are, and we're full of horrible kludges that make reverse-engineering a nightmare. You're playing with what's still to some extent a black box, and while black boxes are manipulable they're notorious for doing things you didn't expect.
The most obvious case of how things could go fatally wrong would be if you selected on genes correlated to income, this selected both for IQ and for sociopathy (since sociopaths are massively overrepresented among CEOs), and you unleashed a generation of IQ-170 supermen who were also 10% sociopaths instead of 1%. The IQ makes the sociopaths more dangerous, not less, and soon your country falls to bits because current solutions to the Byzantine Generals Problem are not capable of dealing with that many defectors. And you don't know what you've done until at the very earliest 15 years or so when crime statistics start to show up (and that dog might not bark, since it tends to be the low-IQ sociopaths that get caught early and often, and also you might not be considering this hypothesis when looking at the data), so good luck fixing it before the state fails. That's a known case, insofar as I was able to think of it. You might be able to avoid that one, if you think of it when designing guidelines for what should and shouldn't be tampered with. But there are assuredly pitfalls that I don't know about, and some of them might be as bad as that one.
TL;DR - the gene pool we've got produces a bunch of people who are mostly capable of getting along. Natural selection is not going to move us out of that sweet-spot very fast, but artificial selection could. As Yudkowsky said, "magic is not for the unparanoid".
I think your entire case here depends on a correlation between high IQ and sociopathy. To the best of my knowledge that's a trope that's not really true, plus where it does apply the sociopathy renders the person incapable of really effective interpersonal relationships (it's not a superpower but a disability). Thus you actually find a higher degree of possible sociopathy in university faculty for disciplines like maths or Latin based essentially on a logical system that can be explored and less in subjects stressing interaction. And that preselects for sociopaths who can cope with the interaction required to get that far through education.
I think, although would welcome correction, that the risk here, assuming that we can't select for high IQ without sociopathy, which is certainly a state that exists, is not a generation of high-IQ CEOs (most ruthless CEOs are probably not sociopaths; humans generally can ignore empathy) but an increased number of potential maths professors.
If you're doing it by mean, I suspect the sign is still positive. Most sociopaths are not violent, and CEOs and other high corporate climbers make *much* more money than average so one of them is worth a lot more than one prisoner.
The case depends on a correlation between high income and sociopathy rather than high IQ. The suggested danger is that we end up creating a population that is more dangerous to society and more numerous than would be naturally occurring and we do it by taking individual steps (seeking high income) that make sense but in aggregate cause a bad outcome.
Many of the responses seem to focus on the specific iq/sociopath combination, but if there are any extremely deleterious aggregations that you get to by following sensible individual steps then this is a problem, regardless of exactly which traits cause it.
I think the argument makes sense but my own estimate of how seriously we should take it is relatively low. I don't think we are likely to hit on traits that make sense in isolation but in aggregate destroy society, I think society is fairly robust and able to cope with many different sized populations of many different kinds of people. Still, it's a good argument for some level of caution.
To be clear, I am not saying that doing this will definitely explode in your face. It might go well, or it might screw up in fixable ways only (to take an implausible example, if 10% of your superbabies chainsaw off their own heads on their 16th birthday, that's bad, but it doesn't take your entire country down with it any more than thalidomide did and you can learn from it). I'm pointing out that it won't definitely not explode in your face, because the task I was given was to make val "understand how anyone can object to this".
Consider another hypothetical (but keep in mind that the whole thought experiment is based on what we *don't know* about how genetics interconnects, so even if you don't think the specific case is true, the thought experiment is much larger than that).
What if the genes for schizophrenia are linked to human creativity. That for every XXX creative people, we get someone whose mind works outside of expected and healthy bounds and we call them schizophrenic, but it has the same root genetic cause. If we severely restrain possible schizophrenics, we may inadvertently remove creative people - artists, writers, visionary architects, whatever. I don't think we can fix that once it happens.
Or for something more contrived and less "maybe so" - what if we intentionally bred aggressiveness out of the population? Like, less fighting, less murder, less domestic abuse. Sounds great. So in 50 years whoever participated in this plan would have almost no violent crime, a clear win for policy! Then a country that didn't do that threatens the non-aggressive neighbors and maybe invades. Oops, nobody in the peaceful country is willing to fight back and gets conquered, choosing to live as second-class citizens or slaves rather than fight back.
Again, these are just thought-experiment hypotheticals about unforeseen consequences. Reality might be far harder to predict and far worse - like susceptibility to viruses or creating a new genetic defect that makes someone sterile.
For one thing, this all assumes essentially universal adoption. Polygenic screening is somewhat invasive and expensive, so uptake will be slow.
Lets say schizophrenia is linked to creativity. Is it the only source of creativity? Probably not. Are we talking about having 10% fewer schizophrenics and 2% fewer artists? This seems like a small enough effect that we catch it before it does serious damage. Honestly, in the modern world with x billion people we probably *need* fewer revolutionary artists than we once did.
Also, it's possible to just not select on +110IQ intellectual traits at all. We can stick to addressing metabolic issues, cancer, and maybe intellect related problems like phenylketoneuria.
"I don't think we can fix that once it happens."
Why not? I mean, as a general heuristic if you only select against genes that have a less than 1% prevalence in the population, you're probably not going to drastically alter the human character in any irrevocable way.
I think the worst case scenario is something like 'increased vulnerability to epidemic infection if odd polymorphisms are removed.' But we're probably at the point where improved GDP is enough to justify fighting plagues with vaccines rather than genetic polymorphisms.
"Oops, nobody in the peaceful country is willing to fight back and gets conquered"
I think there's a big difference between "A 5% reduction in murders" and "we have no soldiers whatsoever." This is assuming that polygenic selection is far more powerful than it is. And even if we assumed it was that powerful we'd still have Nintendo Pilots and people willing to shoot others with guns. We'd maybe lose some of our knife fighters, but does modern warfare really hinge on them?
I mean, simply put I suspect that human plasticity is sufficient to prevent most of these cases from becoming catastrophic, without some really, really long time frames to play with.
I agree insofar as the optimal amount of schizophrenia might well be non-zero. As long as IVF combined with polygenic screening is a rather rare beast for most children born (much less than 0.1%), denying it to parents with high-risk genes seems just cruel. - Otoh: Scott carries at least one "problematic" gene -and some for OCD - thus, he and his wife might choose an embryo who is not a carrier. Among Ashkenazi, there are several known "issues" that seem somehow to be connected with exceptional intelligence and/or talent. ...
This sounds a little like the paperclip optimizer problem applied to IQ / genetics. The danger of improved performance capabilities is, potentially, a reduction in satisficing behavior.
While members of the rationalist community are a bit more resistant to bias than the general public, one issue I see cropping up again and again is assuming that there are not certain baseline risks inherent in the "status quo." There's some argument that genetic load in humans is increasing over time. Improved medicine means that some people who would have died out instead continue to live. We've shied away from this notion because the last attempt at a 'eugenics movement' was such an unmitigated Human Rights catastrophe. But there are likely costs to 'doing nothing.' And they may become worse with enough time, even to the point of becoming an existential risk.
So yes, improving IQ via polygenic screening specifically might increase the risk of, say, drug use. But polygenic screening shouldn't need to be risk free. It should just need to be lower risk. At the very least we should be able to point to cases where the risk-benefit ratio is high enough, even with incomplete evidence, that intervention is probably beneficial.
I mean, technically the whole 'butterfly effect causes Hitler to come to power' applies to every action we take every day of our lives. But we shouldn't allow that "Pascal's Wager" keep us frightened and in bed all day.
Over long enough timescales, with enough gained information about what does what from limited runs with substantial monitoring? Sure. I did only say that natural selection wouldn't move us out of the sweet spot *very fast*, not that it wouldn't at all.
YOLO rolling it out to a significant fraction of the general public, though, seems like the risks are a lot bigger than they need to be. Dysgenics is slow; we don't need such dangerous levels of haste to deal with it in time.
I will note that there are some political problems with attempting to do this sanely, most obviously the dilemma of "if the vibes are that this is dangerous, you will get eaten by ethicists calling you Dr. Mengele and/or Dr. Frankenstein; if the vibes are that this is safe, you will get eaten by people demanding that you approve it RTFN so they can use it". Don't know what to do about that.
I mean, technically, all of this is slow. Most people ware not going to get polygenic selection now, especially if they don't already need IVF. Only 2% of births are from IVF. Only a fraction of that 2% are likely to opt for polygenic selection. And only a fraction of the mainstream population will want it, perhaps those who are found to already be at high risk, genetically. The process of egg extraction is at least a little invasive, about the equivalent of laproscopic surgery, I believe. Getting polygenic screening meanings also getting the equivalent of IVF, unless I'm mistaken.
"Dysgenics is slow; we don't need such dangerous levels of haste to deal with it in time."
As an ex-risk? I agree wholeheartedly. On the other hand, reducing diabetes, cancer, and other serious illnesses would be beneficial right now and would very likely yield more good than harm.
I agree that there are messy political problems with rolling this out. But I'd rather deal with the technical cost-benefit first and leave the 'vibes' to other, later people There's a compromise position, though, where this is 'rolled out' only in extreme cases, with higher and higher hanging fruit picked over time. If you're legit fighting cancer (though maybe not only cancer), people are a lot less likely to call you Dr. Frankenstein.
I'm all for early approval. I think we can do better than random selection right now. Whether it gets funded by insurance for everyone who wants it is a different story.
The question is whether human life per se is sacred, or only human life without suffering. It seems to me that nowadays human life only has value if it is absent of suffering (hence widespread acceptance of euthanasia, abortion etc). Human life in and of itself is no longer sacred (unless we're talking about capital punishment for serial murderers, then it's still sacred).
I believe suffering is (unfortunately) an intrinsic part of all human life, thus it is an incredible arrogance to believe we can decide who should live or die based on our assumptions of how much or how little that theoretical person will suffer in their theoretical life.
Indeed if we start selectively aborting, where does it stop? Or, more importantly, why does it stop? What reasons become valid reasons to abort or to not abort?
(Needless to say I am one of the pro-lifers, anti-IVFs, who apparently has a "complete lack of empathy for women"...)
I really hope you will live with a really terrible suffering to experience yourself in full, how suffering is a part of human life. Also, I hope all your doctors tell you that they don't want to give you painkillers. With reasoning that if you use any painkillers, then you'll use oxycodone and heroin next, because obviously you won't stop.
I don't see wishing this person to suffer to be advancing the argument.
Besides, your wish will come true: this person *will* suffer, or else die quickly. The same fate is in store for me, and for you, and everyone else here. In the meantime, there's a lot of arguments to be had.
Well, I am more of a pragmatic kind. If someone cannot be swayed by arguments, maybe can be swayed by emotions and personal experience. I just believe it is unethical to think that human life with a little suffering is the same as with a lot of suffering. IMO, pain is the worst that can happen, and it is much better to live less then to live longer and suffer.
I think most people think otherwise, until they are old and in pain. When this happens, they split in a more even proportion.
If they were suffering, would you believe their life was less valuable than it is now?
All I can say that I am suffering, and I value my life less. I am ready to "spend" it if, for example, I am given 10M for it that I can give to charities of my choice.
I am 95% sure I wouldn't have this thinking if I did not suffer.
I don't see how arrogance is involved. The whole point of Scott's article was that no matter what you do, you're making decisions that one person will live and another will not. Since you have to make those decisions, why not make them in the way that will on average reduce suffering?
Also, if life is so sacred, why would you argue against IVF, without which fewer children would be born full stop?
The pro-life position is that human life is sacred, therefore you can't kill humans. (Many make an exception for executing murderers, as murderer's are humans that have violated the sacred taboo of "don't kill humans"). The value pro-lifers are aiming at is "minimize the amount of murders" not "maximize the amount of human beings".
For the record, I am anti-capital punishment as well (though extremely pro "life-imprisonment means life-imprisonment"), I just don't understand how the typical extreme supporters of abortion rights are also the extreme anti-capital-punishment crowd. I don't understand the criteria they use to consider a serial rapist/murderer's life as being sacred, but not the life of an unborn human being.
And indeed valuing existing human life does not equate to being in favour of (artificially) fabricating new human lives. Or are people who are against murder also supposed to be against birth control?
My particular human life need not and should not be sacred to me, but I would certainly want it to be sacred to other people.
Assigning value to people based on attributes (suffering for example) is problematic because arguments based on such values tend to offend our sense of individual humanity and often lead directly to decisions that are widely viewed as evil, or at least very wrong. (Eugenics anyone?) Some truly great art was produced by people because they were suffering. Emily Dickenson? Should society have relieved Beethoven of his cruelly isolated life of deafness and left us without some of his best work? My last few years brought on suffering I could not have imagined, and only now am I allowed essentially unlimited painkillers. However, I regard these as good years for so many reasons that have nothing to do with pain. I prefer Scott's framing that starts with a decision and then chooses the path that leads to the better outcome. This can be worked out without placing different values on people (or cells or whatever).
The point would be that embryos are not alive (yet). We already selectively abort in many countries in the case of chromosomal development disorders. Is human life worth/valued less as a result in Iceland? That does not seem to be the case.
nit, re:
>The point would be that embryos are not alive (yet).
I would phrase this differently. I would say that embryos are not _people_ (yet), since, e.g. they don't yet have a single neuron to their name, let alone personality, memory etc.
But they are alive, in the generally accepted sense that e.g. a single human muscle cell is alive. It metabolizes, it can synthesize proteins etc.
This is only true if you're "preventing human suffering" alone, which shouldn't be assumed to be the case for anti-schizotypy PES:
https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/is-traumatic-brain-injury-caused
You more seem to be preventing a neurotype with pros and cons, where most people with that neurotype never develop schizophrenia.
I don't object to it. And I'm an atheist, too. But there are definitely a lot of things about the idea of genetic screening that I do not like:
-It is going to be very expensive for quite a while, so only well-off people can take advantage of it. It will be another instance of "the rich get richer." only with this they won't just be getting further and further beyond the poor in money, but also in having a healthy constitution,physical attractiveness, intelligence, athleticism, etc. Seems like it's going to make the rich/poor even divide larger and harder to cross.
-There is something special about making your child via sex. It makes both children and sex more magical. Giving that up seems like a significant loss to me.
-You know that feeling when you get to create an avatar, and feel sort of excited about what you can make with all the different choices, and then you see that what it comes down to is about 7 categories (hair color, etc.) and 5 choices in each, and suddenly you lose you sense of there being a whole world of wild possibilities? I'm not crazy about baby-making getting more like that. Screening for illnesses seems OK to me, but choosing physical and mental traits seems a lot less so. Things get more boring, less varied and unexpected. You know how in a lot of games you get dealt a hand, either literally, as in card games, or metaphorically. And that is part of what makes the game fun -- playing the hand you've been dealt. There's something I like about playing the hand you've been dealt in life, too. And we are built to do it. We may do less well if we can choose too many of our cards.
Your first point is great and worthy of emphasis. And I get your second point. But your third,
>And that is part of what makes the game fun -- playing the hand you've been dealt. There's something I like about playing the hand you've been dealt in life, too.
I like this in video games too, but it’s fun because the stakes are negligible, and in a game you can get as many hands/lives/characters as you want. I’m sure you’ve met real people who’ve been dealt a really shitty hand (substantial cognitive struggles/disfigurement) and you wouldn’t consider their source of suffering, their dealt hand, part of what makes life fun. I know you said screening for illnesses is fine (which I definitely agree with) but particularly with mental illness, the line’s fuzzy sometimes.
And you start your third point by saying you love the variety of traits available in custom character generation because it provides you with more trait choices. I don’t think your value of trait selection in games jibes with your objection to trait selection in life. Both are in essence a kind of character customization.
What I said in the third point may not have been clear. What I meant was that the idea of a custom-made avatar seems thrilling, I usually find when I get around to making it that my enthusiasm fades. There aren't really that many categories to make choices in, and not that many choices in each category, and all the results look similar, really -- all like little avatars. But I agree this situation isn't really a great comparison. But there's something in it. I have grim imaginings of a future where everybody looks like Barbie or Ken .
But about playing the hand you've been dealt: I think people enjoy that even when the stakes are not negligible. For instance, I enjoy rock climbing and backpacking, & so do a lot of other people. And in both, once you're far enough from your starting point that simply returning to it is not practical or safe, you just have to make it work -- whatever's there in the rockface, the landscape, the weather, the state of your gear, etc. I think that's why sports like that make people feel so alive. I'm sure there are many activities that have that play-the-hand-you've-been-dealt quality, with stakes that aren't negligible but medium-sized or high. We are probably engineered to thrive best in life situations that have a fair amount of that sort of thing.
I don't know what to do about bad cards, especially bad "mental health" cards. Some of them are associated with extraordinary talents, especially bipolar. Both poets and stand-up comics have very high rates of what's called affective illness in the trade, but if you know one or read their autobiography it is clear that being them is often delightful. And society needs them! They give us insight, and new ways of thinking about things, and permission to acknowledge things, and great enjoyment. They wake us up. People on the autism spectrum often have extraordinary gifts too.
And even the cards that seem purely bad may have some benefit, even for the individual that has them. Would Hawking have done the work he did if he did not have ALS? Maybe he would have just been a physics professor somewhere, preoccupied with tenure and getting laid and the family finances. And I have known many people who have been dealt bad life event cards who have responded to them by becoming experts on life events of that kind, or becoming unusually kind and empathic, or just by zooming off to some career or lifestyle that's as far as possible from the b.l.e., and thriving there.
This feels kinda strawmanny?
Then again, I have many times presented a strawman in these comment threads explicitly because i did not know the steelman and wanted to be presented with it
so like
the steelman is that your argument proves too much, and would perhaps condone euthenizing other net-negative-lives without the consent of those individuals
consent is a *really really good* schelling point when it comes to euthenization of net-negative-value lives
anything that messes with that schelling point, honestly more of a schelling fence, is a pretty serious problem
even if it doesn't work very well with net-negative-value lives who are incapable of giving consent
"given their complete lack of empathy for women carrying issue doomed to die shortly after birth"
So let's murder them now, that's so much more kind and nice!
Hey, why not murder the parents of the schizophrenic baby while we're at it? They've already demonstrated they have inferior genetics which produce undesirable offspring, why give them the chance to keep spawning schizo babies? It's way kinder all round to put them out of their and our misery!
Yes, a very weird argument: “This child might die very early, so let’s kill the child even earlier”?
How quickly will we get from “it’s compassionate and correct to use IVF to select only the children who have the best chance of a happy life” to “it is uncompassionate and wrong (and therefore immoral) to have a child who has an elevated risk of x y or defects/illnesses”?
If I had listened to good moral and medical sense of this kind, my firstborn would not be alive, because her genotype is *absolutely certain* to cause a crippling genetic ailment that results in early death—only it didn’t and they still don’t understand why, and now it turns out many more have this genotype and no illness either.
There was a sad case, after we permitted limited legal abortion in my country, of this kind. Parents were told due to a prenatal check that the child (or to spare the sensibilities of those who are 'it's not a child, it's only potentially a person', the foetus) had Edwards' Syndrome, and decided to abort based on that.
Then afterwards it turned out that this was a mistaken diagnosis and the foetus would have been a healthy boy. The couple sued over this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/23/irish-couple-to-receive-damages-over-advice-that-led-to-unnecessary-abortion
Yes. What's especially funny in my case is that the genetic screens continue to be 'positive.' (Providence, I think, that my wife and I are dedicatedly pro-life, and just elected not to do most screening at all.) And that's because, as years later I have discovered, the entire understanding of particular genes involved is flat wrong: many genes which are certain to lead to "severe disease" are not certain to lead to any disease phenotype at all. Many of the organizations researching it have had the evidence for 20+ years but are reluctant to change standards of diagnosis and care in the literature because (as near I can tell) a discovery to that effect would greatly decrease estimates of disease prevalence and therefore lead to a decrease in research funding for cures.
I wonder how many other abortions are conducted because of false positives, or in situations where even a true positive indicates only a chance of a diseased phenotype.
I think a false negative is at least 20x worse than a false positive in that case, so the optimal number of false positives is probably nonzero.
I think it's mostly an extension of the good anti-eugenics heuristic we culturally evolved in the 20th century into an environment it's not suited for.
Do you understand how many people object to cheapest novel of making better people: cloning the best people. No deciding if PGI good or not, no wearysome process of extracting eggcells for IFV. Just simple cloning.
This is literally my politics - I'm a single issue voter: My single issue vote is "we need to clone Lee Kuan Yew 200 times, and make him dictator-for-life of the ~200 nations."
Why LKY? He's the only trench-proven Philosopher-King that we have DNA for. There's a couple of other historical leaders we might try, but there's no DNA and their stories won't be as well attested as LKY's anyways.
I haven't had occasion to exercise my single issue vote yet, but hope abides!
I don't know if I can add much to Deiseach in terms of a steelman, and I am in Scott's camp, but my steelman would be that opponents are reasoning by moral analogy. A lot of people would find it objectionable to bear triplets then kill the one least likely to succeed. It's monstrous, it exhibits a lack of respect for the loser triplet's personhood, etc. Then you move back to the day before birth and perform a selective abortion, and it looks kind of the same morally to a lot of people. Then you move another day back, etc.
I think Scott's right that most people who object to "playing God" by choosing among a set of fetuses to decide which one gets to live are probably opposed to IVF in general, but I can see them arguing that it's an *additional* harm that we're saying that one of the six fetuses has more right to live than the other five because of its superior genes.
You say, about the anti-abortion position:
But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term.
I think that there is such an argument, if you accept the premise. Polygenic selection makes IVF more popular, so more people will do it. This is the reason that we make it illegal to pay for murder — it makes murder more popular. You still have to accept the non-selection is homicide premise to get to that conclusion, but the structure of your argument was that you were momentarily accepting it for the sake of your argument.
> This is the reason that we make it illegal to pay for murder — it makes murder more popular.
I don't think that's why we make it illegal to pay for murder. Rather, we have decided that when people cooperate to commit a crime, all the persons working together to commit that crime bear individual responsibility for that crime. We call it a "conspiracy". When Person A has paid Person B to murder Person C, then Person B is guilty of murder and Person A is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. If Person C does not die, then Person A is guilty of conspiracy to commit attempted murder.
But the person who actually commits the murder is guilty of both murder and conspiracy. So they have personal responsibility twice? This isn't relevant to the topic at hand, but it's just something I always thought seemed silly.
> So yeah, the actual murderer should get punished a bit more than the one who conspired and paid for it etc, but not much more.
Sure, but should they be punished more than someone who committed murder all by themselves and did all the things everyone in the conspiracy did?
Perhaps a rational solution would be to have state-approved certified murderers, trained in painless methods of murder. (They would also respect victim's preferences about organ donation or cryonics.) If you hire the state-approved murderer and he gets caught, you still go to prison for murder. But if you perform an unprofessional murder, the penalty for "murder without license" will be much greater.
The murderer has no legal responsibility to avoid getting caught, but we should expect that the ones who don't get caught will be more popular on the market. (Problem is, how will they advertise the fact, without getting caught as a consequence? But that's not my problem.) The murderer's legal responsibility is to make it painless and respect the victim's preference about how to handle the body.
(not entirely serious proposal)
The Assassin's Guild can serve as a clearinghouse, and maintain the organ donor and cryonics registry.
I want to get certified as a potential murderer. How do I get certified? Do I have to prove I have the requisite skills, or just the inclination? How often must I get re-certified?
As a customer, I'll want to check the certification is valid, and maybe check references on my potential murderer. "Four stars - respected the client's organ donation preferences with a quick decapitation, with minimal pain, and preserving all parts with a nearby refrigerator. Was a little untimely, but one must remember that a popular murderer has many clients and these things can take time. Would contract to murder again."
Outside of the obvious moral implications, this would be bad because the state-approved murderer would take little personal risk, as his action is not illigal. This would potentially allow him to go to greater length to finish the job. Specializing, while avoiding prison time would also potentially make the state-murderer better at his job compared to other hired killers - potentially increasing the rate of murders overall.
The conspiracy occurs once two or more people agree to commit the illegal act, and take some material step towards that goal. This is important, because it allows law enforcement to arrest the conspirators before the illegal act occurs, or is even attempted.
These are different words for the same thing, though. A has responsibility for the murder because A caused it to happen.
I think you have put the rabbit in the hat. You say,
Rather, we have decided that when people cooperate to commit a crime, all the persons working together to commit that crime bear individual responsibility for that crime.
Why have we decided that? To disincentivize cooperating in the commission of the crime — to make it less popular, as I originally phrased it.
It's also to punish more harshly because it's more difficult to catch. If disincentive = P(getting caught) * punishment, then if P() is smaller you want to increase punishment.
I think we make it illegal to pay for murder because it's a wrong in itself'. In fact I don't see how it's significantly different from murder in the normal sense; you're deliberately causing the death of another with your actions.
Another metaphor would be if every time someone is murdered, 10% of the victim’s wealth went to charities in the murderer’s area. After the fact, the donation clearly improves world utility, but the rule means that people have a reason to want to kill each other.
Thanks, that's a good point. I agree that anti-abortion people can oppose polygenic screening on this basis.
I should chastise myself for only identifying the utilitarian incentives-oriented theory of punishment. But I think you get to the same position for other theories of punishment. For example, if you think that criminal punishment is to make a communicable moral statement, the same logic holds.
Also socially we would generally consider specifically killing lots of schizophrenic people as more evil than killing the same number of people at random
> It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term.
It's also more crisply totally incompatible with PGT-M. This line of argument doesn't allow discarding an embryo which inherited Huntington's Disease, where a person could live a couple healthy decades first.
I don't think the "life begins at conception" people honestly have thought through these cases carefully so I don't want to say it's a reasoned argument against PGT-M, but the two can't really coexist.
> I don't think the "life begins at conception" people honestly have thought through these cases carefully
In my experience, many of them *have* thought it through. They just say that it's "God's will" and leave those families out to dry. They fully understand the implications; they just believe that taking action to avoid it is immoral.
I think there are two groups of people here. Group one is opposed to abortion because it feels like killing a baby. They have not grappled with the difficult bioethics questions and probably see no contradiction between their pro-life stance and being excited about their friend starting IVF after years of failing to get pregnant. Group two has grappled with the bio-ethical questions and to still be consistent has to take a pretty hard-line stance against IVF, the morning after pill, and some forms of birth control. I think with the recent ruling in Alabama, we're going to see that group one is much larger than group two. I think the political dynamics of the abortion conflict are going to shift away from consistent life-begins-at-conception believers having much ability to affect public policy.
I think you're right.
A lot of those who have grappled with the implications are themselves perfectly willing to live with the consequences, as painful as they may be at times. I've known couples who have lost their babies to a known issue moments after birth. I also know couples who have raised severely disabled children, many of them having known the child was going to be born with those limitations. They genuinely seem content with their choices despite the pain - i.e. they made a reasoned choice that what they were doing was better than the alternative (abortion in this case).
These are also the same type of people who stay with a severely disabled spouse or donate a lot of time to caregiving and foster care.
I also agree that these people represent a small minority of the pro-life crowd, and that the less intentional people will prefer to compromise (6-15 weeks for abortion, like in Europe) rather than face the difficult consequences of these situations.
"Group two has grappled with the bio-ethical questions and to still be consistent has to take a pretty hard-line stance against IVF, the morning after pill, and some forms of birth control."
This assumes all positions against abortion have to be deontologist. It's perfectly possible to hold an "IVF being an option is better than IVF not being an option, but it's still morally complex and murky" stance. (This can come with interesting side positions, like being pro-transferring-lots-of-embryos.)
In the real world, people routinely land at stances like this. Very, very few people either believe 100% or 0% in fetal personhood. The parents of IVF embryos routinely have complex moral quandaries over what to do with embryos, and feel bad about just discarding them. People pay the monthly fee to keep embryos stored for years and years, even if they don't think they want more kids, because they can't bear to make a decision.
For what it's worth, the scientific consensus is that neither Plan B (what people usually call the “morning-after pill”) nor ella (a newer drug with a different mechanism of action) prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. Both operate almost entirely by preventing ovulation, and maybe secondarily by preventing fertilization.
There was never actually any scientific reason to think Plan B would prevent implantation, but for weird political reasons they said that it might on the label when it went OTC. They finally changed the labeling last year: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information-patients-and-providers/plan-b-one-step-15-mg-levonorgestrel-information
Interesting paper on how this happened and what it says about the role of values in science: https://philpapers.org/archive/CHODFV.pdf
I must be way out of the loop, because I cannot imagine someone who is not opposed to IVF based on “life begins at conception” grounds but is opposed to embryo selection because people should be born with diseases (and it’s somehow bad to prevent that). I don’t know anyone like this and my theory of mind is also failing me here
I think it's discomfort with judging people with certain conditions as "unworthy of being born." To get into the theory of mind, imagine the technique was developed back when homosexuality was considered a disease, and used to select against potential homosexuals being born. Or if your politics are different, imagine woke IVF clinics selecting against genes for high testosterone in order to prevent the disease of toxic masculinity.
I don't know where they would draw the line on what's a clear disease though. Maybe they don't? I can imagine arguing that an embryo with a genetic disease that kills in childhood "deserves to enjoy her precious few years" or something.
It's possible to also be in denial about their denial long enough to let the IVF eugenic clinic do its thing. Many people out there just do not feel a strong need to be ideologically consistent, especially if they believe their quality of life is on the line in some way.
This is indeed my objection
I remember after Dobbs, there was an argument I heard a lot about how the laws being passed might even stop a woman from getting an abortion if she found out her baby had Down Syndrome. Apparently you can test for it a few weeks into pregnancy.
I generally support the right to abortion. Arguments about how the parents often won't be able to provide for the child, or how they'll go on to disproportionately commit crime and generally be maladjusted, are quite convincing to me
However, I can't think of a less sympathetic argument than "we need to abort people with Down syndrome before they have the misfortune of existing." That just sounds utterly demonic
The difference is that other arguments are either about stopping bad things from being done to the child, or about broad utilitarian arguments that aren't really about individuals. I don't consider Down syndrome a horrific disease, it's part of the beautiful diversity of human existence, and it's indefensible to systematically eradicate people you happen to find distasteful. I'm less rosy about schitzophrenia, possibly because I've seen its negative effects personally, but the class of argument is definitely a slippery slope
(I'm not claiming my opposition to Down syndrome screening is rational or good, just describing a worldview)
It may be clown world to you, but that's pretty much the nub of it. "We do not deem people to be genetically undesirable and then discard them for that reason" is a towering monumental value for many, worth putting up with a few minor absurdities (such as "we don't actually believe embryos are people, but this is clearly intended to ensure that a certain kind of person disappears, so it's bad") to uphold.
I don't think I'm sufficiently convinced that the slope is slippery (the actual ferocious fight can be held off till we get to purported intelligence eugenics, which is what this is really about) to endorse this position, but I'm directionally sympathetic to it.
We have real life examples of societies aborting, for instance, girls as being less desirable. This has had real world negative impacts. Just because you don't find someone's existence preferable doesn't make you right.
There's also the question of how we value human life after birth. If society comes to the point where we agree that a Down Syndrome baby should never have been born, how long will it take before we are euthanizing Down Syndrome babies who are already born, or perhaps even adults? How long before society is making a decision to remove other, already alive, undesirables from society?
And that's not a hypothetical - obviously Nazi Germany did this but I don't want to Godwin this conversation. I bring it up to remind people why some of us have such strong heuristics against this whole realm of action. Arguably Canada is doing a lighter version of this *right now* through the MAID program. They're offering death to a pretty wide range of situations, including *poverty*. Do you think a society that accepts that would balk at trying to convince severely disabled but content people (who cost the state money to support) that they should kill themselves?
Just for a ground-level argument against not being against Down syndrome: it often causes quite bad physical health problems, which are not beautiful from the point of view of the sufferer. Also there is, I think, an argument that we should also care about the other individuals affected by the birth of a Down child; some families definitely do well enough in such a situation, while others absolutely don't. It can turn some happy grown-ups into deeply unhappy grown-ups (especially when their child with the Down syndrome is visibly suffering from the physical side of the problem), and ruin the childhoods of siblings.
This makes me think of common arguments against consuming animals and animal products. (To be clear, I'm not comparing people to animals or making an argument one way or another.) That it's unethical, even immoral, and animals are not ours to use in such a way. Which, if we completely ended the practice tomorrow, would mean many animals that would have otherwise been bred for the purpose of consuming them and/or their products would instead simply never come into the world in the first place.
When it comes to selectively terminating otherwise viable pregnancies because of confirmed or potential serious health issues, and raising livestock, ultimately the choice boils down to bringing a life into the world with the understanding it could (or will) end unnaturally early, possibly (perhaps certainly) suffering a great deal in the time it has to live vs. never getting to live at all.
Which is better? Which is worse? Preventing suffering is good - but can we really ever be certain that an entity we prevented from existing because it would have suffered and possibly die early necessarily would have agreed with that decision if they had been able to weigh in?
I think this may be one of those questions in life that just cannot be answered. Instead, when faced with such decisions we must factor in other considerations to arrive at a conclusion (e.g. the needs of the mother, which is absolutely a valid consideration, or the precise nature and extent of the anticipated suffering), but ultimately the core dilemma remains unresolved.
> I don't consider Down syndrome a horrific disease, it's part of the beautiful diversity of human existence, and it's indefensible to systematically eradicate people you happen to find distasteful.
You have an extremely rosy view of Down Syndrome that is not accurate in any way, shape, or form. Having a Down Syndrome child often ruins the lives of all family members involved - parents, siblings, those siblings' future children when the parents get too old to care for the Down Syndrome child and foist the care onto the adult siblings... everyone. Everyone suffers.
> However, I can't think of a less sympathetic argument than "we need to abort people with Down syndrome before they have the misfortune of existing." That just sounds utterly demonic
I think "force entire families into destitution and misery because they had the misfortune of conceiving a Down Syndrome child, when you could very easily prevent all that misery" is even more demonic.
To be clear, I would never advocate for a *legal mandate* to abort/embryo select away from chromosomal abnormalities. Some families do end up somewhat okay, and I would never force a couple to not continue the pregnancy if they wanted to try. But the vast, vast majority of families do not do ok. Studies that track the outcomes of these families spend most of their pages quibbling over the exact distinction between "bad" and "very bad" outcomes.
As soon as it becomes socially acceptable to abort (like in Europe), then >90% of couples abort.
...And then they go on to live happy lives with healthy children. *That is unequivocally a good thing.*
This post by Scott is very relevant here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/
This is an empirical question. Down syndrome is either like Autism and Schitzophrenia or it's like dwarfism and being deaf.
I haven't seen a write-up like that one about how miserable it is to have Down syndrome, and if I did I would probably change my tune.
Also, Scott's article acknowledges that these things can just be symbolic and that's okay under the right circumstances. My opinion on this has no real consequence, but there are some artists with Down syndrome whose work I really appreciate, and I'm more invested in my relationship with that community than my non-existent impact on abortion rates. Or, "Scott doesn't hate people who say things shouldn't be cured, he hates people who write Vox articles"
Something like 90% of fetuses with down syndrome are aborted. I’m curious if you think you would decide against it if you were an expecting parent? Consider the implications for the following decades of your life - and of the child’s life, if you have the option to have another. Perhaps you are part of the 10%. Are you confident this is the right choice for all families?
First off, if you frame it as "the parents won't be able to care for special needs children" then it's shaped much more like the arguments that I find convincing. One can imagine that other more well-resourced families will keep having these children and it's just a matter of placement, which makes it less distasteful
As for me personally, I have highly non-rational feelings about parenthood, for reasons. I'd like to imagine myself being willing to raise special-needs children. However, I can't have children, so I get to have abstract principled stances that never need to be tested against reality. And no, I don't plan to adopt special needs children because it sounds really hard. That feels different to me, but objectively it's at least a bit hypocritical.
Notably, I don't claim to be a good moral actor here. I wouldn't necessarily volunteer, but I still think it would be good if I were forced into it. Voluntary action isn't always an expression of moral preference
I've faced this hypothetical. My fifth child had markers for Down syndrome and the Ob/Gyn raised the possibility of abortion on those grounds. My wife and I are serious, active Latter-day Saints. We kept the baby. He doesn't have Down syndrome, for which I'm grateful; we've already got one other child who has autism severe enough that she'll probably need to live with us or other family for the rest of her life.
But it did mean that we were done having kids. Too much risk of a severe disability, and I don't trust my own good intentions to overcome the real stress of caring for a child with as severe a disability as Down syndrome is.
> To get into the theory of mind, imagine the technique was developed back when homosexuality was considered a disease, and used to select against potential homosexuals being born.
I don't really get it. Imagine that the technique is developed right now. It will still be used to select against homosexuals being born. For a child to become homosexual defeats the purpose of having the child.
... does it? At least a few of my lesbian friends have given birth to their own children via donated sperm.
That is an adjustment that gets you from "For a child to become homosexual completely defeats the purpose of having the child" to "For a child to become homosexual almost completely defeats the purpose of having the child", which leaves the conclusion "as long as the technique exists, it will be used to select against homosexuality" in place.
>I don't really get it. Imagine that the technique is developed right now. It will still be used to select against homosexuals being born.
I would also expect this to happen (on average). Generally speaking, even with LGBTQ+ rights, I think it is reasonably clear that homosexuals have generally harder lives than heterosexuals, and parents generally prefer to spare their children avoidable pain.
>For a child to become homosexual defeats the purpose of having the child.
Huh??? Could you elaborate? ( I, personally, am childfree, so I have the advantage of not needing to articulate a purpose for having a child at all... ) What purpose do you have in mind? Do you expect everyone to agree with it? Or at least all parents to agree to it?
My old anatomy textbook from college mentioned that a fairly large percentage of fertilized embryos pass without implanting. (Just looked it up again and Google says 10%-40%.) I think it you're asking the question, "when does a woman have a moral obligation to a fertilized egg?" it doesn't make sense to set the bar before implantation. Otherwise, you'd need to worry about embryos that naturally fail to implant. But you'd never even know about them anyway, most of the time.
Embryos-as-persons thinking is usually coupled with action-equals-responsibility thinking.
I'd say action > consequences > responsibilities is probably more accurate. I'm just saying that there's a period between fertilization and implantation where embryos sometimes die without anyone caring one whit about them. If so, I don't see the ethical difference between a failed implantation and a prevented implantation.
Lots of human organizms die at every stage of life.
We don't strip humans of ethical value over a one-off 50% chance of death in the near future
Agreed, but the question isn't whether we're stripping away life so much as attaching an ethical duty of care. As a rule, we don't attach an ethical duty of care based on need alone, devoid of circumstance. If there are starving children in Kenya I may feel a moral desire to help those children, but society doesn't attach a duty of care for me to do so. If there are starving children in my own house I do have a duty of care to those children.
Well, yes, that's what you'd say, but most of the people who want to stop IVF work internally on a you-broke-it-you-buy-it model. They would say something like, "Nature is allowed to kill as many people with earthquakes and hurricanes as He wants, and you don't have a duty to build stronger houses to save them, but if *you* shake someone's house to death, that's your problem."
It's the difference between a baby that dies of SIDS and one that is smothered with a cushion. Lots of babies suffocate and die naturally, that doesn't make it okay to take an action to ensure that outcome occurs.
I can see why you're drawing this connection, though I don't agree that it's the same. One seems more like swerving out of the way to avoid an object in the road, vs. swerving to hit it. I think reasonable people can interpret the situation in both ways, though.
Actually it's even worse than that. Approximately 100% of fertilized embryos eventually die.
As I've yet to meet an argument for the rights of embryos (and for clarity I regard these as weak arguments) that doesn't ultimately derive from a conception of the soul, and therefore God's will. I think your objection is therefore likely to be simply overrode by a God's will argument: it is up to the relevant deity whether an embryo implants or not. It's intellectually highly consistent, and does mean that theirs an argument that we are playing God by selecting embryos, not because God requires all embryos to implant but because it is for God to choose.
Arguments of that sort always make me wonder how the arguer originally learned which things humans are allowed to try to control and which things we aren't. Is there a list somewhere?
Well yes. It's implicit in the interpretation of the relevant scripture and/or teachings. That the implicit list may not be obvious to unbelievers is clearly no objection to its validity. And those who claim to be believers but have different lists are wrong or even unbelievers as well.
Facetiousness aside, there's no single list because different interpretations exist in all religious traditions (and indeed in secular philosophy). That the current lists tend to be heavily biased against deviations from patriarchal models is probably not some attempt to oppress people through misogyny etc, but simply because religions are normally long-established and therefore have a body of teachings that were developed when that was the social norm.
We must travel very different circles, then. The "biblical origin" of pro-life sentiments I've come across is "thou shalt not kill". Maybe I don't know the Bible well enough (or interpret it differently - which everyone does) but I don't know where it says "once the egg is fertilized that's when God puts the soul into it, and that's when the commandment against killing begins." Since being anti-murder is near universal in modern society, the biblical contribution to the discussion isn't what in dispute. It certainly doesn't answer the question of whether/when murder can be considered to be happening in edge cases, such as when a person is brain dead or prior to birth.
Those aren't 'spiritual' questions, though they can certainly be moral ones, and various religions definitely do weigh in. In my experience, the framing that this is ultimately a debate between religious/atheists is excluding many non-religious people who draw the line a lot closer to conception/implantation and have a moral objection to it that isn't informed by unknowable arguments like "God's will". And on the other side, plenty of religions do not weigh in on when during the pregnancy a 'soul' is there that we should care about.
If there is a god, then we have a conscience, and that's where the list would be.
That seems kind of at-odds with religious stories where God gives out commandments. For example, the Old Testament has a story where God carves "thou shalt not murder" onto a stone tablet to make sure people got the message, and this seems to imply that God wasn't willing to rely on conscience alone to communicate important moral principles.
Also--and I realize my previous comment perhaps didn't do a great job of getting at this, but--regardless of where the list came from...once you know it, shouldn't you be able to describe it?
If a person says we shouldn't do X -because- "that would be stealing" or "that would be murder" or "that would be adultery", then I normally expect they can give at least a rough description of what counts as "stealing" or "murder" or "adultery".
If someone says " you shouldn't do X, because that would be bligith," and I ask them to describe this "bligith" category, and the best they can do is say "search your conscience, you should have a definition in there somewhere (but I either won't or can't put it into words for you)" then I would be pretty unimpressed with their moral argument, and I suspect you would be too. (Notice that even if I -do- have such a definition in my conscience, I still need to somehow learn the mapping between conscience-objects and the verbal labels that they are using to refer to them.)
I've seen a number of instances where someone has claimed that some specific action is bad because it is "playing God", but I can't recall anyone ever making a serious attempt to describe the boundaries of what does and doesn't fall into this "playing God" category, the way we do for "stealing" or "murder". Have you seen any such attempt (that you'd put stock in)?
Right. But without a god, every action is licit. What is your argument for the rights of born human beings?
Isn't it the opposite though? With god, every action is licit? Because whatever I do is god's will? "God told me to skin you alive", and all that.
Whereas being an atheist I don't get to use the higher power to excuse my terrible deeds. They are on me.
As a religious person, it always makes me cringe when other religious people make the argument that atheists can only be moral insofar as they stole that from religion. Please note that not all religious people feel this way, and that when you hear those arguments, you're hearing from the fringe and not the silent majority. I'm not cringing because I think it's not tactful. I'm cringing because it's not true.
I consider all the arguments that "atheists don't have morals apart from religion" to be spurious and uninformed. There is plenty of historical evidence that atheist/secular groups develop strong moral/ethical principles, including principles that have later been adopted as 'obviously correct' by religious people today. It's simply not true that atheists are amoral, nor is it true that moral development comes strictly from religion.
I challenge you to find a religious person who accepts what you wrote as matching what they believe. If you can't, I submit you have been misled by an extreme viewpoint into accidentally arguing the other extreme.
Maybe if you believe in a Calvinist God. I think most religions would hold that our sins as such are not willed by God, although He may will things that necessarily require allowing us to choose to sin.
Yeah, I completely disagree with you on this. If there is a god, and ergo we have free will, and ergo there is a fixed concept of right and wrong, then clearly I can choose to do wrong. The difference is that I can recognize the wrong that I've done (because I can measure it against a fixed moral point, ie. god). If there is no god, you can't even define wrong, and as such, you can do none of it, and recognize none of it.
Aren't you assuming I believe in said rights?
In reality if I am asked to identify a personal moral framework it is do no harm, restricted to humans (personally defined as having been born, mainly because otherwise this allows people an excuse to do harm to pregnant women) and with an understanding that doing harm lessens the restrictions on others to do harm to you. I'm not sure I need to define a moral basis for that, insofar as I am aware I am human and so are others. I find asking for a moral justification for treating others well to be a peculiar thing: do I need to philosophise about why I always greet my neighbours, who are all pleasant people?
If you'll allow a whimsical counterpoint: do I need to justify every time I philosophize about deeper motivations? If I seek to understand the inner workings of the cell, nobody questions my desire to understand the world around me. Perhaps I can put my discoveries to good use.
Why should it be any different if I'm seeking to understand the inner workings of my own motivations? Perhaps I will be able to put the insights to good use. If your stipulation is that I shouldn't require you to participate, I'd absolutely agree with you.
But doing no harm to other humans is pretty much impossible! You need to add something about reasonable harm compared to what you gain, and even then the balance is really difficult.
I have no idea where the "God's will" arguments come from. I've never understood how people can make them in good faith. My suspicion is that they're a bad-faith attempt to 'win' an argument by cheating. It implies that the invoker of the argument somehow knows God's will in every minute circumstance. Else, how would they know when a human action is in accordance with God's will vs. opposed to it?
For example, was it God's will that humanity discovered birth control? What about Plan B? "No, that was man's doing, so its use is off-limits." Okay, then to be consistent it was man's doing that we discovered chemotherapy, antibiotics, and aspirin! But they're not going to let grandma die because it's "God's will" that she not get chemotherapy. And I doubt most religious people would cede that ground and accept that all medical breakthroughs are divorced from divine inspiration. But then when can you say that one breakthrough is "God's will" versus another that's not? You'd need divine inspiration. Are these people claiming a prophetic mantle? I don't like Kool-Aid, thanks.
As you can tell, I'm having a hard time giving the "God's will" argument a fair hearing, which suggests I don't understand it as well as the people who make that argument. (I know it's not the argument you're making, so much as invoking against what I said. I don't expect you to defend it. Knowing I can't makes me worried I don't understand it at all.) I'm just trying to figure out how anyone can make that argument in good faith, and not as an isolated demand for rigor.
Maybe they'd say it's okay to save grandma's life with technology, because you can thwart God's will to prevent death, but not to end life? How would they come to that conclusion, though? Is it buried in the begats somewhere, or is it just post-hoc rationalization that supports their position, so they're going with it? If so, why should anyone be required to accept it?
As someone who routinely defers to the Will of God, I'll try to shed some light on how I view that line of thought.
We can't defeat God's Will, no matter how we might try, but he obviously doesn't stop all things that are outside of His Will (i.e. sin exists and we know God doesn't like it). God gives us freedom to choose between right and wrong. God's Will is also not specifically known to us, so we can't follow it like a blueprint for all situations.
Instead, following God's Will is about aligning our priorities and purpose towards God. Rather than consider a situation in how it makes us wealthier or fulfills some hedonistic purpose, we consider how well we're oriented towards what God would have us do, as recounted in his Word (the Bible). So, something as core as "Love your neighbor as yourself" should be incorporated into how we go through life. That alone doesn't tell us whether we should support something or be against it - we could love our neighbor by offering government welfare or that could be something that slowly destroys their lives by breaking down society (to give a common debated topic). To me, either one of those could be examples of living out God's Will, if the person making the choice is considering what God would want out of that choice, instead of what they themselves want. If I don't like welfare because I don't like taxes, that's me thinking from selfish reasons, even if I tell people it's because of something more noble. If I truly don't like welfare for noble reasons out of a desire to help people and therefore serve God, then that would be seeking God's Will instead.
You're probably going to complain that such a viewpoint would allow people to do anything they want, and I would agree. The same is true for any philosophy that's followed falsely or hypocritically. This is also known to Christians. Here's Jesus in Matthew 7:21-23 - 21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
So, if Grandma is sick and chemotherapy would help, most Christians look at that and say "God's Will [based on my understanding of scripture] is for us to help her get better." But if Grandma dies, either before treatment or for lack of treatment, we don't look at that as the worst possible outcome. Death isn't the end, so we don't (or try not to) fear death as some ultimate evil or ultimate end. Similarly, we don't or shouldn't fear pain, economic hardship, etc. the way we would if those were the highest priorities. God's Will does not prioritize what might normally be considered the highest order purposes of non-believers, such as wealth or even good health. Often wealth leads to miserable situations for all people involved, which is something that following God helps us to see is a facet of reality. It turns out winning the lottery is a strong net negative for most people who do. Many rich celebrities have miserable personal lives and unhappy families.
With all of that in mind, we shouldn't look at a disabled child as the worst possible outcome either. If our purpose is to follow God's Will, then that means our purpose is not (directly, at least) trying to maximize GDP or reduce stress or whatever other reason people might give for destroying an unproductive or counterproductive human life (as in, a life that takes more resources to maintain and doesn't repay society through taxes). Despite being pro-life, I'm sympathetic to a couple that would want to save their future child years of pain and early death. I'm far less sympathetic to a couple who don't want the extra work or the interruption to their life plans that such a child would represent. Something along the lines of "We planned to travel the world, so we can't have a child with [specific disability]." I'm not planning to stop people from getting abortions, especially if it's their reasoned and selfish desire to avoid what they don't want to deal with. Those people aren't concerned about God's Will either way.
I'll be honest, I don't think you've articulated "God's will" in the way we're talking about as a command against intervention. I respect your position, and think it's totally fine. I just think maybe you don't hold the position I'm asking for justification of - which is a much stronger position to be in! The position I'm asking for justification of is, "If conception happens, it's God's will and any interference by preventing implantation or birth is therefore prohibited."
The bit that worries me here, particularly in relation to your first paragraph, is that the idea that God allows the creation of things that are not his Will is akin to a diluted form of dualism, wherein material things can be created by an agency other than God. At the minimum it's a return to pre-Christian positions where man and God can both create reality. But it allows the insinuation of a negative deity into the story, a creator of bad things (the "Devil's work"). If God's Will was that existence exists, and this was his work alone, how can anything that exists not be God's Will? I'mHumans have free will (thanks Augustine...) but I don't think that extends to the power to create, so everything that exists has to exist because it is God's Will. Which means the issue is not whether something exists due to God's Will, because of course it does, but whether God wished us to use it. I would argue that becomes an individual matters of faith but many seem to feel that they are justified in setting rules on the assumption if God's Will, seemingly because they can take it on themselves to judge how the relationship between God and others should proceed.
N.b. it's this sort of absolutism and denial of chance that makes me a theist rather than religious. I may therefore have a strong bias...
Here's one: human life is sacred, regardless of the circumstances of that particular life. IE, human life is sacred regardless of intelligence, race, gender, prestige, political power, wealth, physical abilities, etc. Sacred means to set apart and treat differently from others of it's class: out of all animals, humans are the sacred one. BBQ the corpse of a pig and you're fine, BBQ a human corpse and you're a cannibal and have desecrated a corpse. We treat humans differently. Kill a man's pig and your only crime is destruction of property: kill a man's child and you are a murderer. And if you murder, then society may kill you because you have violated the most sacred taboo and no other punishment meets the severity of that crime.
An embryo is a very early stage of human development, much like the baby stage, the toddler stage, the adult stage, and the geriatric stage. It is a human life, and all human life is sacred. Therefore, we must not kill embryonic humans.
Naturally you can disagree that human life is sacred, but this argument has nothing to do with the soul. It's not unique to myself either, this is essentially why the whole Catholic Church is opposed to abortion.
But for this argument to be valid one has to accept that the embryo stage is an actual human life (as opposed to a potential human life). That's plainly open to debate, since all the other stages you discuss are united by being separate organisms that are not dependent on any one human for survival whilst an embryo is totally dependent on one particular human (female)band is therefore a very different state of existence. That degree of dependency can reasonably be taken as an indication that an embryo is not actually alive in the same way as a babym
As you can see, I'm not buying the.logic applied by the Catholic church. After all, the pig it is acceptable to kill is clearly much more an independent living organism than the embryo. Potential to be a person does not mean an embryo will become a person, and I think the attempt to extend personhood to an embryo is unacceptable because it interferes with the bodily autonomy of an actual person, the mother (and, as someone who has had a round of IVF fail, until someone builds an artificial womb, embryos not implanted are certainly not potential humans anyway, merely potential potential persons).
Whether an embryonic human is a human is a biological question, and it is not controversial in the field of biology.* It is not potentially alive: it is alive. It is not potentially a human: it is a member of the species H. Sapiens. This is what H. Sapiens looks like at the embryonic stage of development.
Whether an organism is dependent on another organism for survival has no bearing on whether it is alive or whether it is an individual member of a particular species. Though I will note that humans are dependent on other humans for survival at many stages of development, including the newborn stage, the infant stage, and the geriatric stage. You don't stop being a human because you can't take care of yourself anymore.
*some receipts:
The Encyclopedia Britannica says the following: "The zygote represents the first stage in the development of a genetically unique organism."
The textbook Concepts of Biology states that "The development of multi-cellular organisms begins from a single-celled zygote, which undergoes rapid cell division to form the blastula." As does the textbook The Developing Human which states "Human development is a continuous process that begins when an oocyte (ovum) from a female is fertilized by a sperm (spermatozoon) from a male to form a single-celled zygote." Human Biology states that "The germinal stage of development is the first and shortest of the stages of the human lifespan. The germinal stage lasts a total of eight to nine days. It begins in a Fallopian tube when an ovum is fertilized by a sperm to form a zygote (day 0)."
Columbia University's online Human Development class resources defines a zygote as "a diploid cell resulting from fertilization of an ovum (mature female germ cell) by asperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being."
And here's a grab bag of cited quotes saying much the same thing.
"Embryo: An organism in the earliest stage of development; in a man, from the time of conception to the end of the second month in the uterus."
[Dox, Ida G. et al. The Harper Collins Illustrated Medical Dictionary. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, p. 146]
"The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote."
[Langman, Jan. Medical Embryology. 3rd edition. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1975, p. 3]
"Zygote. This cell, formed by the union of an ovum and a sperm (Gr. zyg tos, yoked together), represents the beginning of a human being. The common expression 'fertilized ovum' refers to the zygote."
[Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N. Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects. 4th edition. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1993, p. 1]
"Although life is a continuous process, fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed"
[O'Rahilly, Ronan and Muller, Fabiola. Human Embryology & Teratology. 2nd edition. New York: Wiley-Liss, 1996, pp. 8, 29. (p. 12}]
"Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)... The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual."
[Carlson, Bruce M. Patten's Foundations of Embryology. 6th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, p. 3]
If you can find a biologist claiming that an embryo is not human, let me know.
In the good old days before the industrial revolution, population growth was limited by the horsemen plague, war and famine.
While God picks the victims for plague and war, for starvation, parents can allocate the resources among the family. Given the high infant mortality and the need for people able to work in the fields, the competitive strategy was likely to feed first the adults, then the older children and let the babies and sickly kids starve first. In any case, the parents were forced to "play God".
Furthermore, one could claim that the parents were at least negligent in not limiting their family size -- after all, the church was never shy about telling people not to have sex. However, for married couples, having as many kids as nature allowed was seen as desirable (which makes perfect evolutionary sense, but also indicated a reckless disregard for them dying of starvation).
The analogy is not perfect, the starvation risk is statistical, while the the pigeon hole principle will make certain that some embryos will die. And embryos are of course quite different from three year olds.
I think IVF (just like stem cell research) is just a stray casualty in the abortion war, which is part of a larger culture war on non-procreative sex.
i think schizophrenia and autism, two highly heritable conditions, are going to be targeted first by polygenic selection (OK, real talk, thre are ppl who have already done this...)
Scam. Polygenic prediction couldn’t predict schizophrenia. If the embryo is male and you predict it’s schizophrenia just based on that, that’s twice as good a predictor as polygenic score was. Just a grift and nothing more. Behavioral genetics is a null field. It’s scandalous that this fantasy continues. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wgjph
Commenter you're replying to is the author of said paper, citing himself.
I can't figure out his background but as someone who has dabbled in academic behavior genetics, the abstract looks correct and solid to me.
I’ve read most of the paper, and eventually gave it up as an utter waste of time. Author cannot straightforwardly deny heritability, so instead he’ll gesture at a reason why it might be biased, and leave things at that. It’s dril’s “drunk driving may kill people, but it also let’s people get to work on time, so who’s to say whether it’s a good or bad thing” blown up to paper size.
When we have cheap tech that can make site specific edits do you see the ethics around this changing? For instance, in the extreme case, a Down syndrome zygote that can just have an extra chromosome yanked out before it has even cleaved?
I know that’s haram right now but actually hoping pro life side might come around to it for the specific use case above.
Schizophrenia is definitely the most requested of the polygenics.
I suspect we'll never convince >50% of the worlds population (or even the US) to use IVF, so there would never be much selection on a societal level.
Wouldn't the effect be to push down the intelligence of those from the unselected-for-intelligence population compared to average? We can probably isolate genes for intelligence enough to produce above average children more, but I don't think we can guarantee geniuses (that's complex) so rather than producing a discrete population of highly-intelligent people you'll simply make the overall population a bit more intelligent on average.
It would be interesting when you can convince 50% of a small insular area to accept it, and every generation they filter their genes more and more.
What chance do you give for significant lifespan extension developing in time to benefit those aged, say, 20-40 today?
(...because I'm gonna be really mad if I'm one of the last to die as a crippled oldie at ~80.)
Oh, no! The youth won’t culturally fit in with their parents’ generation! Lots of kids will be smarter than their parents! This has never happened before!!?
Not a geneticist, but my understanding is that the result at the population level would be boring: hardly any effect at all. Each particular gene for a polygenetic trait has a tiny effect. Most embryos with any given gene wouldn't be screened out, because it's not accompanied by all the other genes that collectively make it a bad thing to have.
A poker analogy: let's say you shuffle 10 decks of cards and throw out every hand that has four aces. When you're done, how many aces have you removed? Not many, because most hands will have fewer than four aces. It's not much of a filter.
Here's the way I see it. Say there's a million genes that either have a positive or negative effect. At first, they're equally likely to be either, and the total averages around zero. But it goes up or down by around a thousand. You could easily select just people with a thousand more good genes than bad genes. Then the next generation, you're selecting from those people. On average, the embryos will have the same net good genes as their parents, so around a thousand, but they still vary by a thousand, so now you can select embryos with a net two thousand good genes etc.
Sure, it's "not many" genes in that each generation you're only bringing it 0.1% closer to the optimum. But you're also bringing it up by a standard deviation or more each time, and pretty soon the average person has better genes than anyone in the first generation.
Though I guess that just means there'd be a slow and steady improvement until someone figures out how to change genes directly (which probably won't take that long), and then they'll blow it out of the water.
Polygenic selection seems like a great idea, but I do have a question on it (unrelated to this post, which is about an argument I find ridiculous).
If widespread polygenic selection leads to selecting embryos that match the comparatively few characteristics we think are good, isn't it quite possible to face unintended negative consequences from lack of genetic diversity? In a book I read, 'Seeing like a State', European foresters thought it was a great idea to replace wild forest with monoculture plantations of trees they thought were good, but in retrospect they didn't have a good enough understanding of forestry science and it turned out to be a mistake.
A lot of genes are apparently just 'bad', getting rid of mutational load shouldn't be similar to a monoculture.
If everyone decides to just become a Jewish Ashkenazi at a genetic level (as we're a very successful group) there will be issues.
I feel like it shouldn't be an issue when selecting for health, Iq, looks and a bit of height, but I don't know and strong selection might have created Tay-Sachs, so I'll defer to the experts
There have been surveys done that show that parents would choose agreeableness and extroversion once they can choose personalities genetically. that could have very weird effects on society.
I'll try to find it but I don't know if my google is that strong. It was more than a few years ago, probably linked from slatestarcodex or maybe marginalrevolution, and it was the survey was asked in the context of being able to genetically manipulate your kids (not just generally what would you prefer your kids to be like).
Is this it? https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/08/welcome-genetic-engineering.html
Free version: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/personality/2017-latham.pdf
It gives me the ick too, but I'm guessing Scott (and a lot of very reasonable, compassionate people) would happily risk less genetic diversity if it meant irradicating a lot of our worst mental and physical illnesses. It feels like nazi science to me, but there is an argument that I'm speaking from the privilege of not suffering from or seeing anyone close to me suffer from something terrible that's caused by what is essentially a bad genetic roll of the dice.
Also, some people reduce the risk of having a disabled child by simply having fewer children. Either they do not have children at all, or they have one or two and then decide that they got lucky but should not push their luck any further.
(From certain perspective, this is a selection pressure against whatever traits make you more likely to know and care about the potential disabilities of your children.)
The hell is "Nazi science" even as a concept? Scary facts?
Even if that were the case, how does selection for health = Nazi anything?!
Nazi science is generally understood to be medical experiments on humans without their free consent. The connection between selection for health and nazi anything is, of course, eugenics. Eugenics has an understandably bad rep nowadays, and just saying that "the new eugenics is based on Science" doesn't help too much, because that's what the previous iteration also claimed.
Nazi science in the sense that its easy to imagine a world where the fact that technology exists to make a class of person who is healthier/taller/smarter/whatever means that anyone who is born without that technology or who is judged to have not made the best use of it gets stigmatized. Which might just be the result of me having seen too many movies/read too many science fiction novels, but it is really, REALLY, easy for me to imagine and it gives me an immediate sense of morals squeamishness.
More generally, I think there's a pro-libertarian argument for polygenic screening and other forms of genetic selection, in that you are actually getting "more" choice about what kinds of traits your child would have then you would otherwise have if it were left up to chance, but the objection is the same one you always run into in all libertarian arguments: people won't actually make choices based on what they want, or even what's best for society, but on whatever they think affords them the most short-term maximalist game under certain market conditions. As an analogy, I think you already have intelligent, athletic kids who are forced by their parents to participate in activities that pad their resumes for elite colleges than doing what they would like to do with their lives, and this would be that extended all the way down to their genes. So instead of getting any real diversity of choice, you end up with a race towards some BS conception of the optimal Harvard undergrad or what-have-you.
> a class of person who is healthier/taller/smarter/whatever
Then we are lucky that we live in a world where everyone is equally healthy, tall, and smart. Thus no one gets bullied at school for being different, and everyone can find a good job.
(Basically, the dystopian world is not so different from our own. The scary idea is that *someone else* is on the top.)
I mean take this to the extreme - the minimum standard to get into Harvard is now "6' 6" olympic-medaling von Neumann adonis." Why would this be a BAD thing???
The fact that future generations are going to be attractive globe-straddling colossi in all fields of endeavor is an *unmitigated good,* that we should happily pull out our eyeteeth to achieve.
You're telling me you would be *disappointed* if your kid was an attraxctive, olympic-medaling, von Neumann-level genius??
The only objection here is purely "sour grapes" and "I'm not rich right now, so MY grandkids would be at a disadvantage in ubermensch world!"
Think bigger than yourself, think at the "humanity" scale, this is an absolutely unmitigated good that can't happen fast enough.
The only road to regular people being able to make their kids attractive, athletic geniuses is via rich early adopters doing it first - there's LITERALLY no other way. And if you outlaw it in your country, they're going to go to Singapore or Thailand or Estonia or wherever and get it done anyways, that's what it MEANS to be rich.
The problem with eugenics is that even from the start, and before the Nazis, there were a ton of assumptions around what constituted "health".
Eugenicists were fond of using the analogy of animal breeding, and applying it to humans. Sir Francis Galton is the 'father' of eugenics; you tell me, Himaldr, what constitutes "manliness" and how we select for it?
https://galton.org/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-journ-soc-eugenics-scope-aims.htm
"A considerable list of qualities can easily be compiled that nearly everyone except "cranks" would take into account when picking out the best specimens of his class. It would include health, energy, ability, manliness, and courteous disposition. Recollect that the natural differences between dogs are highly marked in all these respects., and that men are quite as variable by nature as other animals of like species. Special aptitudes would be assessed highly by those who possessed them, as the artistic faculties by artists, fearlessness of inquiry and veracity by scientists, religious absorption by mystics, and so on. There would be self-sacrificers, self-tormentors, and other exceptional idealists; but the representatives of these would be better members of a community than the body of their electors. They would have more of those qualities that are needed in a state--more vigor, more ability, and more consistency of purpose. The community might be trusted to refuse representatives of criminals, and of others whom it rates as undesirable.
Let us for a moment suppose that the practice of eugenics should hereafter raise the average quality of our nation to that of its better moiety at the present day, and consider the gain. The general tone of domestic, social, and political life would be higher. The race as a whole would be less foolish, less frivolous, less excitable, and politically more provident than now. Its demagogues who "played to the gallery" would play to a more sensible gallery than at present. We should be better fitted to fulfil our vast imperial opportunities. Lastly, men of an order of ability which is now very rare would become more frequent, because, the level out of which they rose would itself have risen."
Don't forget the vast imperial opportunities! At that time the British Empire was, if not quite in its heyday, just past its zenith. Where is the Empire today?
"Systematic collection of facts showing the circumstances under which large and thriving families have most frequently originated; in other words, the conditions of eugenics. The definition of a thriving family, that will pass muster for the moment at least, is one in which the children have gained distinctly superior positions to those who were their classmates in early life. Families may be considered "large" that contain not less than three adult male children. It would be no great burden to a society including many members who had eugenics at heart, to initiate and to preserve a large collection of such records for the use of statistical students. The committee charged with the task would have to consider very carefully the form of their circular and the persons intrusted to distribute it. They should ask only for as much useful information as could be easily, and would be readily, supplied by any member of the family appealed to. The point to be ascertained is the status of the two parents at the time of their marriage, whence its more or less eugenic character might have been predicted, if the larger knowledge that we now hope to obtain had then existed. Some account would be wanted of their race, profession, and residence; also of their own respective parentages, and of their brothers and sisters. Finally the reasons would be required, why the children deserved to be entitled a "thriving" family. This manuscript collection might hereafter develop into a "golden book" of thriving families. The Chinese, whose customs have often much sound sense, make their honors retrospective. We might learn from them to show that respect to the parents of noteworthy children which the contributors of such valuable assets to the national wealth richly deserve. The act of systematically collecting records of thriving families would have the further advantage of familiarizing the public with the fact that eugenics had at length become a subject of serious scientific study by an energetic society."
Do you have at least two male siblings, and have all of your family gained distinctly superior positions to your classmates? Otherwise, sorry, you must be marked down as "not suitable to be permitted to reproduce"!
I don't think there would be meaningfully less genetic diversity. If you mean something like "percent of sites which differ in two randomly selected people", I think a bunch of generations of polygenic selection would decrease this by less than 0.1%.
I meant more of a scenario where, for example:
Polygenics says a few specific genes at a few specific sites are good for height or eyesight or heart disease or whatnot, and they are extensively selected for. Then 20 or 40 years later, it turns out that these genes also happen to come bundled with other genes that have some specific issue, especially one that turns out to be magnified by coming from both parents. (I have essentially zero knowledge of genetics but I think that genes on the same chromosome can be linked like that?)
Polygenic selection has thus magnified the prevalence of a genetic structure that superficially seemed like a good idea, but turns out to have come with issues we just aren't aware of now.
I don't think there would be meaningfully less genetic diversity. If you mean something like "percent of sites which differ in two randomly selected people", I think a bunch of generations of polygenic selection would decrease this by less than 0.1%. Someone who knows more statistical genetics can tell me if I'm right.
A few different answers to this:
- Most people will be selecting against various diseases. This will select out the genes involved in the disease, but not decrease genetic diversity in any other way. So it would be more reasonable to worry if the genes involved in certain diseases are good in other ways. This is true for some diseases (sickle cell anemia) but probably false for others (de novo mutations). I would hope this science would be used in determining what conditions and genes to select against.
- Most people will be selecting against different diseases, so there won't even be strong selection against any particular disease genes. That is, maybe 1/10 people select against schizophrenia, and the other 9/10 are selecting against other things (diabetes, heart attacks, etc). So at most 10% of people will be missing schizophrenia genes (and realistically each of these people will be missing different ones).
- Polygenic selection isn't very strong. You can essentially imagine it as having 5-10 hypothetical kids and keeping the healthiest one. If we picked the healthiest kid from each existing family and sent them all to another planet to reproduce, I don't think most people would describe that planet as lacking key genetic diversity.
- Realistically this would take dozens of generations of a substantial portion of the world's population using polygenic selection to have much effect. Before dozens of generations are up, we'll know enough about genes to have better options available (or be extinct).
I would argue that now is the best time to be developing at least tentative Schelling Fences about what is or is not okay. If it turned out that doctors developed a way to always select against schizophrenia and it suddenly became cheap and easy, we need a better answer than "at most 10% of people will be missing schizophrenia genes" as our response. That's true now, with current technology. There's no reason to think it will hold for the future as this becomes more widespread, cheaper, and easier to do. It may become quite easy to screen for both heart disease and schizophrenia, making it unnecessary to choose between them.
If we care about selection effects and that's a real problem, we should address the problem.
If people only selected for "does not have this disease", I think the argument could stand. But you know it won't stay like that. Think of all the people in this comment section slavering at the notion of being able to select for intelligence (and height, and whatever else they think is a goodie).
People are going to want the right to select the concert pianist baby because Mom and I both love music and play instruments, or the sports star baby, or 'I've been short all my life and I hated it, I want my kid to be a minimum of six feet tall for a better quality of life', and since we've already given in on the right to select your future offspring based on better outcomes in life (no disease), you can't argue strongly against "no you can't have musically talented or tall kids for better outcomes in life".
Are you familiar with the non-identity problem, in philosophy? That’s relevant to this discussion. See the following for more:
https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/nonidentity-problem/
https://www.amazon.com/Non-Identity-Problem-Ethics-Future-People/dp/0199682933/
I skimmed the comments to see if anyone wrote "Derek Parfit already did this in 'Reasons and Persons'." Yours is close enough.
Likewise. Is this the Repugnant Conclusion debate? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
I don't think it is. This is about substitution that changes identities but not total numbers.
I thought that did also include identities, but this is me having heard one podcast on Parfit a while ago, so my ignorance is vast!
It takes a smart person to be this stupid:
"For, had the couple produced a child but not under contract, the timing and conditions of conception would then (very probably) have changed and any better off child the couple might then have produced would (very probably) have been a distinct child, nonidentical to the slave child (Kavka 1982, 100 n. 15). The slave child, in other words, has no better alternative than what he or she has in fact been given as a slave. Once we appreciate that fact, it becomes hard to see how what the couple has done harms, or makes things worse for, or is otherwise “bad for,” the child."
Uhhhh - they sold their child into slavery, and the new owner caused harm to the child? I think they're responsible for that. Otherwise, there's no harm done by me if I throw a bag over Kavka's head, imprison him in a cellar, demand ransom, and start cutting off fingers for every day I don't get it. If he's the version of Kavka that gets kidnapped and has fingers cut off that came into existence, he has no better alternative and therefore what I do is not doing harm to, or making things worse for, or is otherwise bad for him. If he didn't want to be kidnapped and have his fingers cut off, he should have made sure his mother got pregnant a month later and on Tuesday, not Wednesday.
You say: "But once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos based on some criterion, like low schizophrenia risk, doesn’t make this issue any worse."
The criterion in the schizophrenia case is selecting for non-schizophrenic genes, whereas in the other cases it was more or less random, with respect to genes. . In the schizophrenia case, it might help to eliminate the schizophrenia genes from the gene pool. But some people might still object to this. If they were able to select for alcoholic genes and eliminate those, some might argue that is bad because alcoholics might tend to be more creative than non alcoholic. (For example, a lot of writers are alcoholics.)
Or if you could select for gay genes, some might say we shouldn't be trying to eliminate gays.
But then that’s an argument about preventing the trait by any means: nutrition, whatever. The alcoholism position is a case against rehab and anti-alcoholism campaigns. It doesn’t bear on IVF per se.
It could be argued that some traits are a net benefit in moderation, but too bad in excess. If we figure out a way to detect them in embryos, and eliminate them from the society, we lose the moderate version, too. This will not happen if we merely provide the cure to the excessive version.
Depends on how the genes actually work (I have no idea).
If it is like "one gene = creative; two genes = schizophrenic", we can select embryos with one gene.
If it is like "one gene = moderate creativity + 30% chance of schizophrenia; two genes = high creativity + 70% chance of schizophrenia", this will be a more difficult choice.
Nutrition changes seem easier to reverse than polygenic screening
I don’t see why? The genes don’t go away; if people want to stop screening future embryos, they can.
"The genes don’t go away"
But wasn't the argument in an earlier comment that by screening, we can make the genes go away? Get rid of schizophrenia by selecting for low-risk embryos and only implanting them?
Is there any actual evidence of correlation between creativity and alcoholism? I'm inclined to say no because the vast majority of alcoholics are unnoticed in the population so the perception is of the cases that hit rick bottom and the successful ones, which skews perceptions to make this about success or failure rather than just everyday existence.
Also to be considered: is there something in the creative lifestyle that makes alcoholism more likely, such as musicians and intense partying whilst away from the secure structures of home?
The schizophrenia complaint at the beginning has a much simpler rejoinder - by selecting any of the embryos, they are necessarily not selecting 9 others. In this framing, all possible selections, regardless of schizophrenia genes, have equal moral weight. (Whether one thinks this is a positive or moral weight is beside the point; the point is that they are all equal)
Doesn't that argument also prove that there's nothing wrong with illicit discrimination in employment?
Doesn't that argument apply equally well to embryo selection?
Hmm... I suspect that the analog to "on the basis of merit" is at least fuzzier and more heterogeneous in the embryo selection case. I guess that the closest analog is something like "preferences of well-informed parents" which I'd expect to have more variability than a company's "on the basis of merit", which mostly comes down to profitability. I'm still happy to see well-informed parents select embryos, but I think the arguments aren't wholly analogous.
The correct answer here is "no one", since it was never proven to be an effective practice in the first place.
Other than that, congratulations for rediscovering the arguments of the late-90ies "is-IVF-morally-okay" debate, followed closely by the somewhat less dumb early-2000s "is-PIGD-murder" debate. If you keep this up, we'll have an "eugenics-will-save-us-all" post in a few months, followed by a "are-we-the-bad-guys" realisation in late summer.
Pardon the sarcasm, but if you've dug yourself into a hole, stop digging. Every respectable medical and scientific society spoke out against this previously, and the data are not coming in to change that.
>Those societies can go to hell. They're not moral authorities, they're hyper-ideological, self-interested organizations.
Seconded.
Catch us up then? A link or explanation of what's to come so we can skip ahead in the process?
It was a real comment, not pedantry, so thanks for engaging! I think another natural parallel is abortion for the purpose of sex selection, which many people (including pro-choice people) find very off-putting but is very common globally. We certainly don't call it "preventing femaleness". Specific to IVF, some countries (Germany) knowing the sex of your IVF embryos is illegal to avoid sex selection via IVF.
Fwiw I do feel there is a spectrum, and that while selecting embryos to avoid conditions like "female baby" or "probably shorter than my other embryos" does seem immoral to me, I would never advise a woman to transfer an embryo with (say) Edwards syndrome. Schizophrenia is in between those two.
I agree that this is what changes people's intuition here. I suspect that selecting for/against traits feels *humanizing* in a way that changes the intuitive calculus for some people.
The more we can say " this embryo would be like this, have these traits, be this gender and this tall" and do on, the harder it is to mentally categorize as non-person. Which, to her clear, is a statement about some human moral intuitions, not one way or the other about actual morality.
We can just as well call it "preventing femaleness", I don't see why not. And it seems clear that "preventing schizophrenia" in such way is net good, while "preventing femaleness" is net bad.
I'm against sex selection, but I think the victim there is society (which has an unbalanced sex ratio), and not the unborn woman. I think it would be equally bad if you were creating the child ex nihilo (for example you had a bunch of sperm and could choose which one to use to fertilize the egg) and couples consistently selected for maleness. I also think it would be fine if for some reason half the couples in a country wanted sons and the other half wanted daughters and they both selected for the sex they wanted. It's only in the context of people disproportionately wanting sons that it becomes dangerous.
Seems like you're on some pretty shaky ground here.
1. What if the parents select for females because they think female babies are cuter? You've said you're against "personality" selection so I assume you'd be against this, even though there are plenty more people selecting for males using infanticide?
2. What if the parents claim "females live longer on average so by selecting a female we are giving our baby more QALYs"? Doesn't this now become a morally defensible (if not imperative) act?
3. What if the parents selecting for maleness make up an excuse like "We're preventing ovarian cancer"?
4. Wouldn't all the parents using IVF to prevent schizophrenia end up with only female embryos because maleness is the strongest single genetic predictor of schizophrenia?
Trying to pitch camp anywhere on the slippery slope toward eugenics makes for a position that's difficult to defend.
I'm not sure I understand your objections to my position above. I don't inherently care about any of these things. I think the government has a compelling interest to keep the sex ratio about equal so that people can have families and produce a new generation, plus because the two sexes tend to prefer different jobs and all the jobs need to be done. If there's sexual selection that doesn't affect this, I don't care about it. If there's sexual selection that does affect this, that's why I care about it, and why I think the government should override the general presumption in favor of letting people have healthier children (assuming a rationale like your #2) in this case.
Regarding 4, I don't think there's much evidence that men get schizophrenia more than women.
> plus because the two sexes tend to prefer different jobs and all the jobs need to be done
It seems unlikely that the optimal number of male-preferred and female-preferred jobs are split 50/50. If on the margin we need more men/women for jobs, should the government incentivize selecting that sex?
Ok, so are you saying "choosing your baby's sex" is a public good of limited quantity (like grazing in the commons) and the government will have to apportion it (e.g. by lottery or auction) whenever the required diversity starts to run out?
Does this apply also to other kinds of genetic diversity? Do you think it'd be practical to administer if IVF selection becomes super popular?
And where does this leave you on "personality" selection? Inherently immoral/icky? Or "fine a long as the scale isn't sufficient to endanger society"?
Eugenics: fine on an individual free-choice level, bad on a societally imposed level. Does this seem like common sense? Is it a strawman of Scott's position?
I don't have any problems with polygenic screening, except its easy to imagine it becomes so commonplace that people who were born without it who have easily screened problems are treated as mistakes and stigmatized. Which might just be the result of me having seen too many movies/read too many science fiction novels, but it is really, REALLY, easy for me to imagine and it gives me an immediate sense of morals squeamishness.
More generally, I think there's a pro-libertarian argument for polygenic screening and other forms of genetic selection, in that you are actually getting "more" choice about what kinds of traits your child would have then you would otherwise have if it were left up to chance, but the objection is the same one you always run into in all libertarian arguments: people won't actually make choices based on what they want, or even what's best for society, but on whatever they think affords them the most short-term maximalist game under certain market conditions. As an analogy, I think you already have intelligent, athletic kids who are forced by their parents to participate in activities that pad their resumes for elite colleges than doing what they would like to do with their lives, and this would be that extended all the way down to their genes. So instead of getting any real diversity of choice, you end up with a race towards some BS conception of the optimal Harvard undergrad or what-have-you.
Good on a societally incentized level?
My guess is that's too broad a question. Different people's feelings would obviously vary depending both on what you incentivizing for, and how you are incentivizing for it.
Scott had an earlier post that addressed the general topic of eugenics more directly... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck
...though this was done in the form of a dialogue between fictional characters and Scott was somewhat vague about what he personally believed.
Is it just mood affiliation/fear of the slippery slope to eugenics? (a bullet I'm happy to bite: why would you not want to give your child the best genes possible, regardless of the historical connotation)
If you want your child to have the best possible genes, should you also use a sperm donor who's a Gigachad with three PhDs instead of your own sperm? Unless of course you're a Gigachad with three PhDs.
This could get entertaining if genetic engineering gets more powerful...
How does a prospective parent feel about swapping in _1_ chromosome pair from a tri-Ph.D. , to the gain of 10 IQ points - but being a 1/23rd cuckold? :-)
Resulting soap opera report split between a genetic journal and an educational policy journal? :-)
The Repository for Germinal Choice tried something like this. Though they were advertising using sperm of Nobel laureates, and they only had one. It would be nice if someone did that well, but it's hard enough to get enough sperm without having requirements like that.
A good question, however I think a fair number of people would not feel it to be "their" child at that point (not trying to suggest adopting isn't highly honorable)
Hey now. I have a _name,_ you know.
Just want to say you made me laugh.
People make the argument against polygenic selection because it forces them to think about the influence of genes on various life outcomes. This in turn forces them to acknowledge that not everyone is born equal. But acknowledging this will get you cancelled in certain circles, so you have to try and construct an informal taboo against anything connected to the subject.
As a firm "life begins at conception" pro-lifer, I think Scott conflates two questions in his discussion of our perspective. Namely, "Does polygenic screening cause additional harm?" and "Does polygenic screening prevent schizophrenia?"
It's fair (if horrifying) to say that if you're already killing 9 out of 10 embryonic human beings, there's no additional harm in making sure that you kill the ones with various undesirable conditions. But this doesn't translate into it being fair to say that this process "prevents schizophrenia". You're just killing the schizophrenics.
Suppose a Nazi death camp has a doctor assigned to select certain quota of Jews to be spared the gas chamber and put to work in a labor camp instead. And suppose he makes sure to pick the strongest and healthiest ones without conditions like schizophrenia. The Nazi doctor is not, strictly speaking, making the situation worse. But he's also not "preventing schizophrenia".
A little closer to a group of sailors stuck at sea, choosing whom to eat.
The married guy with two little girls is not getting eaten first, and the guy with stage 4 cancer is
The crux is the lack of resources - the woman can't birth 10 embryos
I generally agree, but the crux in this situation is that they created ten embryos knowing full well they can't use them, and given the choice, we definitely shouldn't send sailors out to sea if they don't have enough resources to make it back without some of them being eaten. If you're pro-life, then IVF with polygenetic screening isn't worse than without, but you really should be more focused on preventing IVF in general than worrying about polygenetic screening.
As a biologist I'm perplexed how you guys can keep worrying about the feelings of undifferentiated cells. I have a lot of cells that die every day; many of them could potentially divide and start a new being; my cactus plant has even more cells that have high chances of dividing and starting a new cactus, but die anyway. (And don't tell me that it's somehow different because these cells are usually not freshly fertilized zygotes (some of them are). Even my somatic cells are former zygotes, my mothers' genes complimented with my fathers', some of them might give rise to a new vegetative organism that we call tumour, others could be technically modified to turn back into stem cells and become a new human). We accept this because space is limited and we couldn't fit so many cacti, or feed so many humans or tumours, and also these cells don't have consciousness anyway (at least not the kind that we would recognise as consciousness). Worry about conscious beings, they are the ones that suffer. The unconscious cells that could start a being but don't will become relevant in some future universe where space on planets and hard drives isn't limiting any more.
You choose to care about consciousness, I choose to care about humanity.
A lot of pro-life people believe in souls. It raises the question of why God doesn't just let dead fetuses reincarnate, but he does lots of crazy stuff.
Very much agreed, well said!
I'm not worried about the feelings of undifferentiated cells, I'm worried about the coarsening effect on human beings of living in a society where killing your offspring is once again normalised.
Let's worry about if shrimp have emotional lives, but aborting a human foetus is just dandy. Why not bring back public executions and gladiatorial games? After all, personhood is just a legal concept, and if we can decide to bestow it at an arbitrary point, we can decide to remove it at an arbitrary point. So you're a drug dealer, now you're no longer a human person, you're just a clump of cells - go out there and dance in your blood for the entertainment of us real humans!
For someone who is not a trans-humanist, every human being which is conceived is doomed to die. There is a real possibility of them suffering a lot before dying.
Of course, for a Christian, this should all be dwarfed by the possibility that their soul will go to hell where they would suffer for eternity.
Under these circumstances, I would say that if we argue if we agree that trying to conceive in vivo is ok and argue about IVF we are mostly haggling about the price.
Well said, seems correct!
I agree that if you assume the life/non-life barrier is a bright line and starts at conception, that's a reasonable way to think of it. If you place the barrier after that, or think it's more of a fuzzy Schelling fence, then I think it more naturally groups with fertilizing some eggs instead of others (in which case the fetal alcohol syndrome analogy applies). I think as a pro-lifer, you can escape the implications of the fetal alcohol analogy by saying the difference is that the FAS woman is killing her eggs (which aren't life) and the polygenic selection person is killing embryos (which are life).
I think if you had a bunch of unfertilized eggs, and could choose which one to fertilize, and you chose one with low schizophrenia risk, you would consider that "preventing schizophrenia" (am I right?) If you're pro-choice and don't draw a strong unfertilized egg/fertilized egg distinction, then I think you should think of these two situations similarly.
Yes I think that if you were choosing which eggs to fertilize that would be fair to describe as "preventing schizophrenia". And I accept that if you don't take a strict conception line perspective, the polygenic screening scenario can be described in the same way.
If you wanted to be even more pedantic you could make the argument that the schizophrenic embryo has not actually developed schizophrenia yet (even if we know it will) and so destroying it does in fact prevent schizophrenia even from a pro life point of view. In the same literal sense prostate cancer can be prevented by executing men before they get old enough to develop it. But I don't think that's the sense you mean to communicate.
Why do you believe there's not a bright line between a fully formed (for its stage of development), developing human life and its precursors? Sperm and egg, without the other, are not a fully formed human life, and will not develop past their current state.
It's a little strange to believe that embryos aren't alive. What definition of life are you using that embryos would be considered non-life?
Yeah, you're right, I should have said "an individual human" or something.
Being pedantic again, an embryo is an individual member of the species H. Sapiens. But I assume when you say "human" in this case you mean "human like us whose life has moral value, a person, etc."
One consideration I think this leaves out: it can be a heavier burden on both parents and children when parents are more the “authors” of their children through trait selection/abortion rather than the “receivers” of their child, open to uncertainty.
The Atlantic had a good piece on Down Syndrome screening (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/)
“The introduction of a choice reshapes the terrain on which we all stand. To opt out of testing is to become someone who chose to opt out. To test and end a pregnancy because of Down syndrome is to become someone who chose not to have a child with a disability. To test and continue the pregnancy after a Down syndrome diagnosis is to become someone who chose to have a child with a disability. Each choice puts you behind one demarcating line or another. There is no neutral ground, except perhaps in hoping that the test comes back negative and you never have to choose what’s next.”
That seems like a fully general argument against letting people make choices, though. Choices come with responsibility, and responsibility can be a burden, but taking away people's choices is rarely doing them a favor.
the ability to commit to not make a choice can actually be beneficial in really powerful ways, this is studied all the time in various models in economics. conversely giving someone the power to make a choice, can harm them, even if they do a great job of choosing.
only useful if there are other people playing against/competing with you, who will respond to your choices, but then again, there usually are.
Technically true but I think those situations are a lot rarer than you're making them sound. They're interesting because they're counterintuitive, and the intuition got to be what it is because it's usually correct.
That is an excellent point. In general, when the stakes are high, we try to pry the choice _out_ of Lady Luck's hand, and I think we are almost always wise to do so.
“The introduction of a choice reshapes the terrain on which we all stand. To opt out of doing something is to become someone who chose to opt out. To do something is to become someone who chose to do it. Each choice puts you behind one demarcating line or another. There is no neutral ground, except perhaps in hoping that there won’t be positive data indicating bad things so you never have to make decisions.”
I think this is a deep error that causes a lot of people immense distress. We only live in the present moment, your memory of the past and imagination of the future are also in the present. There is no difference in what you are between before and after a decision, you don’t become anything new.
This is an excellent point, and we should use this lens on choices more often.
We generally assume choice is an unmitigated good (with the single exception of choice paralysis from excessive amounts of choice), and this points out that choices have a real psychological cost
Is that really heavier than the burden of raising a kid with Down syndrome?
Agreed. This has far wider implications than just for polygenic selection or Down’s syndrome screening, though.
The more we learn about what affects the fetus and born baby, the more we are putting pressure on expectant mothers (and to a lesser degree, fathers).
The most trivial example is that most women I know will be very careful about what they put in their bodies when they are pregnant or breastfeeding. No smoking or alcohol are no-brainers. And they’re also happy to give up soft cheeses. And sushi. And hummus. And … Lots of things that pregnant women have eaten for centuries, because we now know they come with increased risk of harm to the fetus. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit with big harms avoided by easy sacrifices.
But as medicine and technology progresses, it gets trickier. Knowing that some harm is avoidable makes a huge difference. It is an unusual woman who will say that “I don’t care that this increases the risk that my child develops brain cancer by 25% – I’m eating it.” Or, to bring it back to schizophrenia via hypothetical example: “I don’t care if taking this pill will practically guarantee that my child won’t get schizophrenia. I’m not shelling out $80 for a single pill!”
And so the more we learn, and the easier preventing possible harm gets, the more we end up pressuring women and their partners to make easy choices and simple sacrifices, that may not be so easy and simple after all, when they’re all added up and technology and medicine have progressed another few clicks. I don’t think polygenic selection is the next virtually obligatory thing for expectant parents to do, but this particular slope is truly slippery (unlike most things called slippery slopes). As long as parents want what’s best for their children and science learns more about how to do that(?), it seems inevitable.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I agree that it’s a consideration we need to take seriously.
Can you save someone from a traffic accident? After all, the person you saved was by definition not a victim in the traffic accident. You merely preferred to go down the branch in which the person was unharmed rather than the world branch you would share with the traffic accident victim, you terrible ableist.
--
I think conscious beings should get special treatment here. Their preferences regarding if and how they would continue to exist should be respected (within reason). They should not be euthanized and replaced with other conscious beings, unless that is what they want. Thus we do not have to debate if healing a mental or physical illness will just replace an ill person with a healthier (plus or minus scare quotes) one, simply follow the patient's preference.
(There might be some exemptions for young children and psychiatric patients reduced to the cognitive capabilities of young children. Basically, they get to have preferences, but sometimes their preferences may be overridden because of their cognitive limitations.)
So saving the traffic victim is the right choice, because presumably that is what their preferences are. By contrast, plants, insects and embryos do not get that protection, they are morally interchangeable. (At least until you add time travel, traveling into the past and preventing your enemy from being conceived by gifting their parents two tickets for the opera is probably evil.)
> But even this isn’t an argument against polygenic selection. It’s an argument against IVF in general, which usually involves production of more embryos than the couple intend to bring to term... But once you’re already doing IVF, selecting the embryos based on some criterion, like low schizophrenia risk, doesn’t make this issue any worse.
I think that depends on for what reason one chooses to do the IVF. If the purpose of the IVF is to solely select embryos based on some (whatever) criterion (e.g. eliminate schizophrenia), then polygenic selection in this case inherit the moral argument against IVF as well hence the anti-abortionist do have a case here.
I think the strongest objection may be from people who are, not necessarily anti-abortion or anti-IVF, but pro-schizophrenia. When I asked my schizophrenic friend what he thought about this situation he said, "I think we're doomed as a society if people start doing that."
His argument is essentially (a) that schizophrenic people have access to perspectives and abilities that others don't have and that those things are valuable, and (b) that society is narrowing down so that only a very narrow set of characteristics can actually thrive in it, and that THAT is a bad thing, and this is both symptom and cause of the acceleration of that process. Schizophrenia outcomes are much better in societies that don't stigmatize it, so from the perspective of someone who sees value in being a way that not everybody is, I think the answer to who polygenic selection helps is "nobody, but it makes a lot of people think they've been helped, and that's a very bad thing."
I don't know if I agree with him or not overall but I have sympathy for that perspective. People without schizophrenia probably wouldn't have the same thoughts; in which case, it's exactly an example of the kind of perspective that schizophrenic people bring into society that others would not have access to without those people's existence. What do we lose when we select those people out on purpose? What if we don't even know?
I also grant that schizophrenia is a special case to him and by extension to me, by virtue of discussion - I have no idea what he'd think about fetal alcohol syndrome. I should ask...
Can he offer any substantive examples of where schizophrenic input has been useful to society?
John Nash had schizophrenia, but we'll never know if it had any input to his mathematical feats; for all we know, it may have hindered them.
He can't prove it. But he firmly believes that many of humanity's greatest advancements were likely made by people with uncanny pattern-matching abilities, weird thoughts, and willingness to take risks. He thinks schizophrenia itself is important for humanity. But the popular image of a schizophrenic person is a person who hasn't been able to deal with it. Someone who needs help and might be dangerous. So how would we even recognize the manifestations of other patterns of the same thing? We certainly (as a society) incentivize hiding it.
I wonder if the genes with Schizophrenia potential - sorry not my field you know what I mean - are also the ones that create highly creative people? This would be like the fertile sister theory of gay men.
However, what was the experience of his parents raising him? Can they expect grandchildren?
I've known more than a couple people with schizophrenia.
It is, on average, something that makes them much less likely to contribute anything important; it's *really* detrimental, in every case I've witnessed. Their ideas are more along the lines of "wearing red clothes means your allegiance is to Satan" than "hold on, what if we just used THIS pattern but applied it HERE and... [scenes from that movie about Nash]?!"
If your friend is successful or even some sort of mad genius, I think it's almost certainly moreso *despite* the schizophrenia than *because* of it.
(FWIW, my oldest friend with schizophrenia just posted on Facebook again about how much he hates the way he was born and wishes he could be cured; they seem pretty miserable, too, mostly.)
See response to Leona upthread. It turns out there is some genetic evidence around schizophrenia and creativity.
Ah. I came back to say I've been listening to Roy Plomin (who wrote "Blueprint"). It looks as if the evidence points to the risk of schizophrenia being tied to the Openness trait, i.e. the creativity and openness to experience your friend reports.
Plomin says he himself is in the 80th percentile for risk (not the same as 80% risk, as far as I can make out) and that this is true of a lot of creative people.
So I think your friend is right but in the wrong direction. The true seems to be something like: "The price of having creative people in our society is having to accommodate a small number of schizophrenics. Those schizophrenics who are functional are likely to be very creative, but not all very creative people are schizophrenics. "
A counter-argument to your friend would be that schizophrenics have really high suicide rates (attempt:s 18-55%, successful suicides: modal 10%, I just googled it). Your friend is probably unusual, generally they would prefer no schizophrenia.
> society is narrowing down so that only a very narrow set of characteristics can actually thrive in it
Actually, in high-income societies it's almost definitely the other way around biologically speaking; the brutal force of natural selection is softened and people with many health problems are helped to live a reproductive life if they want and find a partner. Natural selection nowadays favors the reproduction in lower societal tiers, where various health and mental problems are more widespread (with some exceptions). Is it then a very good thing for the society? It... doesn't sound so, but you never know.
I think one thing that your counterpoint misses is that those suicide rates need to be evaluated in context: for every ten schizophrenic people in the population, how many are known to be schizophrenic? We have no idea. Most of the highest functioning ones probably don't tell anybody or only tell family and friends. Those would be the ones that figure out how to use the benefits to their advantage or at least deal with the downsides. The ones who go seeking help obviously would prefer no schizophrenia, but that's the definition of a selection bias. And on the other hand, how many are medicated? My friend's opinion (and it really is a friend, not me, I have no actual personal experience with this) is that the side effects of the medication that is available are bad enough on their own to make someone suicidal. My friend certainly falls into the "nobody would know if he didn't tell them, they'd just think he was a unique person" category.
Furthermore, it doesn't sound like you're actually saying that society is allowing those people to thrive. Just to reproduce. But I'm talking about thriving. Schizophrenic people are much less likely to want to die if they're born into a society that respects their challenges and gifts. Historically that's "he can talk to spirits" or whatever. That guy might be revered. As soon as it's a pathology to be medicated away or shunned from society that is when the bad parts come in. Including the internal ones. I'll have to see if I can find a link but from what I've read, in the aforementioned societies where schizophrenia is considered communication from spirits or ancestors or gods or whatever, those communications don't tend to get violent or self-loathing. It wouldn't actually require ancestor-worship to not denigrate schizophrenics though. How bad an experience schizophrenia is in our society seems to be largely on us.
The suicide rate is about half that. There are two big predictors of suicide in SZ:
1. Depression. This is the same big suicide predictor as for everyone else. Depression is relatively common 1. in the immediate post-psychotic period, and 2. for the same reasons other people would be depressed in a given set of circumstances, like if they're unemployed and live with their parents.
2. "Insight", i.e. believing you're sick. This is a huge risk predictor, which a lot of people step uncomfortably around, because it doesn't match what people really want to be true (that "insight" is an uncomplicatedly good thing). If you've accepted that you "have schizophrenia", and the things that people tell you are true based on this, you tend to be in a pretty bad state. If you reject at least part of this (and have less than perfect "insight"), you tend to have more hope.
The big suicide scenario in SZ is a young person who recently had a first psychotic episode, is "stabilized", and has good "insight". They genuinely believe the narrative that's been presented to them -- that they have a severe chronic illness, that things are going to constantly degenerate from here, that they need to take drugs with unlivable side effects for the rest of their life, that their future is extremely bleak, that they will never hold a job, that they will never marry, etc. A hell of a lot of people would commit suicide under those circumstances. The biggest tragedy of all is that this isn't true.
It... it seems pretty true to me, man. As I mentioned above, I have had two close friends with schizophrenia and two other sort-of-friends, and... all four conform to the final paragraph there real well.
Well, one got married (later divorced) and one is able to hold a job. But overall, it doesn't look good, and 3/4 really seem to wish they weren't schizophrenic. One is happy with it — the only female of the four — but looking at her life, which is filled with trials and tribulations she's brought on herself by making insane choices...
...well, I guess she can be the judge, but I wouldn't want it for myself or anyone I loved.
1. The idea that schizophrenia is neurodegenerative, in the Kraepelinian "dementia praecox" sense, is supported by absolutely no evidence and abandoned by virtually all researchers. It remains common in clinical practice, because clinical practice often seems like an attempt at doing the worst things possible. It is, and has been for some time now, the kind of position where its supporters are apologists who write papers with titles like "Defending the neurodegeneration hypothesis of schizophrenia". This paper (open-access) reviews the death and metamorphosis of the neurodegeneration hypothesis in an accessible way; while it's getting up there in years a little, this is still the situation on the ground:
https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/39/6/1363/1884403
2. In the long run, few people who have a psychotic episode experience a long-term disabling chronic psychosis. The most common outcome of one psychotic episode is "functionally-full remission of psychosis, never has another". The most common 'worse' outcomes are things like "less than 100% remission" and "occasional flareups".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10503930/
3. A substantial minority (across decades and every single treatment anyone's ever invented, consistently 30%) of people diagnosed with SZ experience full recovery, with complete remission of symptoms and exactly the same socio-occupational functioning they 'should' have. Another chunk of people have functional but not symptomatic recovery (#2 without #1). Many more people are somewhere on a spectrum towards one or both outcomes. This is actually quite a bit higher than the classically "worst prognosis" that gets represented to most people diagnosed with SZ (about 25%). As Zipursky et al. (2013) discuss in the first paper, this is mostly a "clinician's illusion" -- the image of SZ available to any given practitioner tends to represent the worst outcome, because people who partially or fully recover aren't seeing psychiatrists (and are often optimizing to *not* see psychiatrists).
4. People who recover, partially or wholly, are regularly off medication. Starzer et al. (2023), the second paper, is reasonably representative for follow-ups over its time horizon. Just over half of the best-prognosis and second-best-prognosis positive symptom groups were off medication at 20 years. *Two-thirds* of the best-prognosis negative symptom group was off medication at 20 years, which is pretty remarkable, because it's hard to ascribe a selection effect to that -- the correlation between positive and negative symptom severity was weak and nonsignificant (this is more obvious in the supplementary materials), and neuroleptics have little beneficial effect on negative symptoms. It's unclear exactly when psychosis prognosis becomes "clearest" -- the number of follow-ups over this time horizon is small -- but most information we have implies these groups are generally people who've been off medication for quite a while by the 20-year mark.
This is all very mainstream stuff. I could say less mainstream things I think are supported by the literature, but none of this is that. I know what the truth here is, and I know what the Torrey types were trying to tell me the truth was when I was 16 and fit the FEP criteria and terrified of what was happening to me, and I know they're still telling that to families today. Things are getting better -- slowly -- for some people -- but it's a grievous injustice.
Yeah but Scott is not arguing that selecting against schizophrenia is good. Even though he obviously believes it.
He's arguing against people saying that embryo selection is _not_ preventing schizophrenia in some galaxy brained word jujitsu.
Being against embryo selection is fine. But people are so terrible at decoupling that it's not enough to argue against it on moral grounds.
Fair point
Yeah, I pretty much agree with this perspective (I am the exact textbook description of schizotypal personality disorder, do not fit SZ criteria, fit SZ criteria when I was 16). I think the neurotype and experiences I have are good, and want them to be more common in the general population. The evidence we have about how SZ develops and what components of it are genetic suggests "screening against SZ" would mostly be screening against schizotypal people.
I have another friend with schizotypal PD and he feels the same way. It's not easy! It sure could be easier though! Is humanity really better off getting rid of its weirder members? I don't think so but I'm not schizophrenic so it's easy for me to say. Much more weight coming from people with the experience being those people to back it up.
Surely there are forms of weirdness that are not even necessarily less weird than some forms of schizophrenia, but that don't come with so many negative side effects?
Scott addressed the question of the possible loss to society, and how to balance that, in a different but related post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-cures/
When some people feel a vague distaste to something new they sometimes make up a line of moralistic-sounding bullshit to make this distaste count in an argument. Arguing against pre-implantation embryo selection on the grounds that it does not help an individual is just that, and it is not grounded in legitimate moral reasoning. Scott completely demolished this argument but I'd like add another nail in the coffin:
An individual human is in part shaped but not wholly defined by his genes. We are spiritual beings first and foremost, defined by our memories, desires, social relationships and other indexical features that are created as the brain develops. An embryo is not a person, it is merely a molecular machine that runs a program to create the material vessel in which our spirit gradually grows. "Scott's first baby" is a person, nestled in his unique place in the world, with a unique relationship with his parents. Substituting another molecular machine before Scott's baby was delivered into his unique place would not make it another person. It would be still Scott's first baby, just with a different set of genes.
This way of thinking might feel counterintuitive at first but it actually flows directly from realizing that the individual human existence does not start with some arbitrary molecular event, like the formation of a zygote and a new diploid set of genes. Instead, the human individual grows into being gradually as a neural network that a bootstraps itself into consciousness, many months later. If you believe that this neural stage of development is the true beginning then changing genes at an earlier stage is no longer special, it has the same ontological status as all the other events that impact future humans, be it prenatal vitamins or alcohol abuse counseling of parents.
It is therefore right and proper that we give future individuals the best sets of genes we can, so they grow into more perfect beings.
I disagree quite strongly with this: "Substituting another molecular machine before Scott's baby was delivered into his unique place would not make it another person. It would be still Scott's first baby, just with a different set of genes."
It would be a different person, occupying the same role. "It would be still Scott's first baby" is only true in the same trivial sense that if a different person had won the latest US election "it would still be the 46th president".
If a fetus is aborted or miscarried and then the parents conceive again, is that "not a different person" from your POV? How about if a baby dies in infancy and then the parents have another baby?
How about if a baby is born and then gets swapped in the hospital, unknown to the parents? Is that "not another person, still $couple's first baby, just with a different set of genes"?
How about if Alice is married to Bob but is having an affair with Charles (and suppose Bob and Charles have noticeably different physical characteristics and personality traits). If Alice happens to get pregnant with Bob's baby versus Charles's baby, and either way Alice and Bob bring up the child as their first child, is it "the same person" regardless of whether it's biologically Bob's or Charles's?
The notions of personal identity and of identifying an individual always involve judgments about what is important and what is not. A baby with a little mole on his back is still the same baby. A baby that suffers massive brain damage becomes something else. "The same person" does not mean platonically perfectly identical, it just means "for our purposes not substantially different in the situation we are considering". Identity is not a binary choice, it's graded on a curve. Events that do not substantially change the way the baby and his family relate to each other do not change the child's social identity. The examples you provide mention events that most people care about (child abduction, adultery) which may completely change the relationships within the family. This is not relevant to parents making certain choices (using prenatal vitamins, or using pre-implantation genetic selection), which create somewhat altered versions of the same person or family, not completely different ones.
You seem to consider the value/identity of an individual wholly as an object, only as the sum of its value/identity in the eyes of others. That is to say, you are not considering a human being as a subjective individual which itself forms an identity from within, without the need for a specific environmental context (ie loving parents or whatever). That idea is in itself a de-humanizing one, you even de-humanize yourself with that idea (you could be anyone else, indifferently, if by chance a different sperm had fertilized your mother's egg). Every human being is a universe, replacing one with another in the same circumstances does not sum up to the same result.
Whether "humanness" begins at conception or slowly grows is actually an interesting question. I prefer to err on the side of caution and believe it begins at conception (a pretty clear line when we have a living thing with a full set of human DNA). Saying it slowly grows, leaves the door open to "abort" - how should we call them?- partially-human living things? until... when? 2-years old? 5-years old?...
I started answering your first paragraph but the longer I wrote the less I understood how what you wrote relates to my previous post. I have no idea how to answer your objections.
But, here is what I initially wrote, maybe it will shed more light on my ideas:
Nothing of what I wrote denies the subjective value of a person. Just as we make judgments about the identity of others, so does every one of us make judgments about his own identity. YMMV but I do not put any value on having a specific set of genes running the biochemistry of vessel in which I am currently contained. I value a specific collection of memories, desires and attitudes that collectively define me as opposed to other people. Whether this collection of mental objects is instantiated on this or that genome, or in a silicon chip, it doesn't matter.
Regarding your comments on the beginning of the existence of a person as an ethical subject:
Why is a "living thing with a full set of human DNA" something valuable? My pinky has millions of such living things, my skin sloughs off a billion of them every day. When you say that "humanness begins at conception" you are equating the ethical standing of a single cell with the ethical standing a child or an adult human. Can you treat a single cell as the ethical equivalent of a person? To me this his makes absolutely no sense at all.
I tried thinking really hard about this, then somehow ended up with "Should I be worried that I'm not myself, but actually my identical twin?", then decided to call it quits for the night.
😂
I find questions of identity to be really difficult, philosophically. When I was younger — first posting on LessWrong with Yvain! Yvaine? I think it didn't have the e but I can never remember — I was sort of cocky about my ability to cut through philosophical quagmires; I spent a lot of time discussing and thinking about various "paradoxes" and questions, and I would say "I've never met a so-called 'paradox' I could not resolve to my satisfaction" ("😌").
Then I came upon the Ship of Theseus. Then I came upon the various corollaries and modern modifications involving teleporters and replacing parts of one's brain a bit at a time and AAAAAH—
I *still* have no goddamn idea where to draw the line, really.
We have a mental module that creates the feeling of being a separate entity, independent and somewhat opposed to other humans. You need the ability to separate your self from others to resist their attempts at controlling you and to reduce the passive bleed-over of thoughts and motivations from other minds, or else other, craftier minds will invade your goal system, subvert it to serve them, and eventually suck your dry of resources and life. This individual identity module does tend to glitch when confronted with some scenarios concocted by very crafty minds, like various uploading and teleportation schemes. I spent dozens of hours arguing about it on the extropian list during the periodic recurrences of the infamous "identity thread", and my way of thinking about the self became rather idiosyncratic. Here is what I tend write when the inspiration strikes:
I am a burning spark of heavenly fire, my consciousness gives sound to the falling tree, I make the sun shine the bright light instead of insensate photons. My thought moves matter and pushes ions in the brain, I am the master of my in-skull domain. I, Rafal, or us Rafals, one copy or a multitude, we mental twin brothers are all one, me. When I grow up I will be a robot, consciousness vast, multithreaded, more, more of me!
I think attacking any of this from the angle of where life begins and what can be constituted as "replacing one child with the other" is entirely the wrong model to think about this. All of this - fetal alcohol syndrome prevention, IVF, etc - *feels wrong* to some people because it's artificial, civilized, technological interference with a process of childbirth, which *feels* natural. It feels like it should be a beautiful and chaotic and unpredictable leap-of-faith process, and if you got a schizophrenic child, well, sucks ass, that's fate.
It's the same logic that drives the discussion about "GMO foods" and "would you like tomatoes with no genes and DNA in them".
(for the record, I do not espouse any of these views, but I'm confident people do)
"if you got a schizophrenic child, well, sucks ass, that's fate"
Maybe the question shouldn't be about how much it would suck if we "got" a schizophrenic child but rather whether the schizophrenic child him/herself would prefer to have been born or not? What would they say if you asked them? (this is not meant to be a rhetorical or facetious question, I honestly don't know what they would say - maybe the physchiatrists or psychologists here would know? Do people with these kind of problems wish they didn't exist?)
As I mention above, I have a couple close friends with schizophrenia, and another few sort-of friends who are schizophrenic as well; 3/4 often post on Facebook about "hating [their] disease/brain/self" and at least one attempted suicide.
One appears to be happy with her "uniqueness" (the only female of the four, and the only one who is holding a job).
Anecdotes don't make anecdata, I know; but I certainly have a strong impression that schizophrenia is pretty bad, from my interactions with these people.
But by having the one child, the parent is *not* having a different child in roughly the same period. Would the unconceived other child prefer to be born, or not? It's unknowable, of course, but the odds of them preferring not to have been born are probably much less than the odds of a schizophrenic person preferring that.
The big difference between polygenic selection and your three examples is that of expressing a very specific judgement. Example 3 involves no choice, examples 1 or 2 just say "I want my kid to turn out better rather than worse." But polygenic selection very specifically implies "schizophrenia sucks, my kid shouldn't have it". And I think that activates a strong anti-judging instinct in many people's heads.
Logically it is perfectly consistent to say "I'd prefer a world with no schizophrenic people, but the schizophrenic people that already exist should be treated with compassion and understanding". But thinking that is hard unless you're a super high-decoupler. For many people, hearing "my kid shouldn't have schizophrenia" subconsciously implies "I think schizophrenics are Evil" - and so they feel icky about it.
(Also, this strongly reminds me of the debate around selective abortion in cases of a prenatal Down Syndrome diagnosis. The feelings involved seem the same, even though no IVF is involved.)
As an extra prediction of this explanation: I bet that people would be much less morally conflicted about polygenic selection for resistance to seasonal influenza, because getting flu more or less often isn't an identity, and doesn't trigger the same kind of emotional interference.
“Logically it is perfectly consistent to say "I'd prefer a world with no schizophrenic people, but the schizophrenic people that already exist should be treated with compassion and understanding". But thinking that is hard unless you're a super high-decoupler.”
In the contrary I would wager this is the majority opinion. Most people understand that schizophrenia is bad and that people who suffer from it deserve compassion.
The point about high-decoupler vs low-decoupler is good. It seems to me that low-decouplers are in practice bullies, saying new humans should be born with a disease so that we don't hurt the feelings of current humans with the disease.
I don't think there's an a priori distinction between being against Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and being against schizophrenia.
(VaticidalProphet attempts on his blog to draw a specific empirically-grounded distinction, which I'm skeptical of).
I'll take 'skeptical' -- skepticism is healthy :)
Aside: FAS is tricky. Dan Savage talked about this when he and his husband were adopting their son. They saw so many kids in the system had FAS or potential FAS, were terrified, looked into it...and saw the symptoms discussed by support groups prominently featured such examples as "child argues with parents about chores" and "teenager behaves impulsively". They quickly became much less worried about FAS.
There is very clearly a true, classical FAS. This is a bad thing, not having FAS is a good thing, etc. There is also a broad "fetal alcohol spectrum", which includes many people who do not have the classical FAS facies, but are thought to have the FAS behavioural phenotype. It's...nonobvious...that this should be thought of as the same thing as FAS. In the real world, and in particular in the foster system where FAS diagnosis is usually made, a large chunk of all FAS diagnosis is on this extended spectrum. (Diagnosis in particular systems is a generally tricky problem. Most 'closed circles' -- foster care, forensic psychiatry, memory recovery, etc. -- are prone to particular diagnoses at high rates, where the same diagnosis would not necessarily be made for the same person in a 'community' system. This colours our impressions of such diagnoses, and the data surrounding them.) People with traits associated with the "FAS behavioural phenotype" are both more likely to have kids with such traits and probably more likely to have kids in foster care.
A surprisingly large chunk of people with a clinical diagnosis of FAS turn out to have a CNV that likely explains their symptoms:
https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/bcb-2017-0241
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/10/4/694
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022347617317419
https://adc.bmj.com/content/97/9/812
This should be read as a "hey, isn't this interesting", not as any particular direction of thing. It's interesting. I'm not sure what to make of it. Most people don't seem to be making anything of it at all.
Independent of any empirically-grounded distinction, I think that here at least part of the explanation is that "schizophrenic" is an identity while "FASer(?)" isn't.
/r/schizophrenia/ has 75,000 subscribers and /r/fasd/ has 650, while the "base rates" of having FASDs vs schizophrenia are comparable. In my personal life I've had a few people "come out" as schizophrenics but none as FASDs. And so the emotional reaction to "preventing FASD" vs "preventing schizophrenia" will be different.
(of course we could then ask _why_ FASD is less of an identity, and that's a very interesting question, but maybe not directly related to this post.)
Most of the arguments I've seen around Polygenic Selection center around second-order effects—they're slippery slope arguments, or Fence arguments, saying that if we start selecting against things that are debatably bad (like schizophrenia), then we're going to start selecting against things that are very clearly mixed (like mild autism), then we're going to see pressure to start selecting FOR things that are very clearly bad for the individual but good for society (like obedience to authority). How do you rate these second order effects?
I think this is an argument worth taking somewhat seriously, and I would like to hear what Scott and others think about it. Though I wonder whether the genes themselves would allow for such a slippery slope, or whether selection requires enough trade-offs that rational people will disagree on how much risk of Schizophrenia (or mild autism or disobedience) is acceptable.
e.g. If a 50% chance of increasing your child’s IQ by ten points comes with a 2% increase in risk/severity of autism, a lot of people would probably take it, but some might not. Then repeat with 25% vs 5% respectively. Some will still take it, but fewer. Then repeat with 15% vs 12%. Etc. Multiply by dozens of traits and hundreds of diseases and disabilities.
I don’t yet think we know nearly enough about the tradeoffs involved in picking and choosing our genes, but I suspect we will learn more, rapidly, once we start down this path.
Now, one of humanity’s most common and most harmful tendencies is to be incurious about, and stay ignorant about, the cost of tradeoffs, and instead optimize for some narrow good. (All species do it, but we’re in a unique position to see it and do something about it.) So I’m not sure I dare predict how this might play out, other than to say we have some unforeseen (but not entirely unforeseeable) consequences in our future.
Sure. My point isn’t about individuals though. I don’t care what any one person optimizes for. Natural selection solves for that. For species, the problem arises when entire populations optimizes too much for a narrow good. (Cheap energy provides many good examples.)
Edit, to be clear: The problem arises when virtually everyone makes the same tradeoffs (e.g.: collectively optimizing for having less schizophrenia in society, and losing creativity at the same time, to take an example from Scott’s last post), not when just a few people do it.
I have no moral or other objections to screening embryos for general embryo health, or for the chance that they will grow up to be schizophrenic; implanting the ones with the least risk of the relevant disease; and discarding the rest. But I don't think it's quite accurate to call what you're doing preventing schizophrenia.
Let's say somebody sets up a clinic in some lawless part of the world, where they will test a couple's baby for genes strongly associated with schizophrenia and euthanize the infants found to be at high risk. In this lawless place there are also many people willing to sell their newborns, so the clinic is also able to provide the couple with a new infant, certified to be low risk. Would we call that preventing schizophrenia? I don't think so, and I am really talking about linguistic matters here, not moral ones. Seems to me the normal way to describe what's happened is that a schizophrenic-to-be was denied a chance to grow up, because their growing up included the very unfortunate feature of their becoming schizophrenic. Discarding embryos with high risk would be described the same way.
Or here’s another thought experiment: Let’s say we euthanized all people at age 65. That would undoubtedly reduce the number of deaths from cancer, heart disease, etc. It would reduce the absolute number, but also the fraction of the population that dies of one of these diseases. But you wouldn’t describe that approach as preventing a bunch of deaths from cancer and heart disease, would you?
Maybe I haven’t fully grasped what the point of your argument is. But it seems to me like a sort of convoluted effort to find a non-inflammatory and in fact positive way of describing the process of discarding embryos with high genetic risk of growing up to be schizophrenics. I don’t think it is going to work to change any public attitudes. I think you have to fall back on saying that embryos are little more than packets of genetic info. They’re not alive, not conscious, not people. Consequently, it is sensible and not evil to discard the defective ones.
Yes, I understand that embryo selection doesn't reduce the number of births or deaths. (Actually, neither do the 2 instances of euthanasia in the thought experiments I describe. They just reduce lifespan of the euthanized.) But I don't see what bearing that has on my point, which is just that Scott's use of the term "prevent schizoprenia". seems like it's really straining the boundaries of what we generally mean by "prevent." It seems to me like an effort to make embryo selection more palatable to those who oppose it -- because nobody's going to object to preventing schizophrenia, right?, while many are going to object to “throwing away embryos” with lots of defective genes.
It also seems to me like tricks with words to say someone’s preventing their child from having schizophrenia. Normally what one would take that sentence to mean is that you are doing some medical or psychosocial intervention that would keep the person — not the embryo —at high genetic risk of schizophrenia from developing the illness. But what's really happening is that there are several embryos who could become your child, each of whom would be distinct and different child from all the others in its characteristics -- and you are choosing to allow one of these potential children, the one with the smallest chance of schizophrenia, to develop into a child and be born.
Here’s an analogy. Let’s say somebody I know is about to buy a 2024 yellow Prius, and I work for the company and happen to know that the yellow ones have a weird defect that makes them prone to blowing up at high speeds in hot weather. I tell my friend that on no account must he buy a yellow one — so he buys a blue one instead. The normal way to talk about this would not be to say that I prevented my friend’s next car from blowing up. It would be to say that I prevented my friend from buying a defective Prius that would have blown up. There were multiple possible next cars, and I prevented my friend from choosing the bad one. Likewise, the normal way to talk about embryo screening would not be to say that I, the genetic screener, prevented the couple’s next child from becoming schizophrenic. It would be to say that I prevented their choosing the embryo that would have developed into a schizophrenic.
>But I don't see what bearing that has on my point, which is just that Scott's use of the term "prevent schizoprenia". seems like it's really straining the boundaries of what we generally mean by "prevent."
I agree with your point. ( To an extent it depends on the granularity with which we observe the process. If we treat the whole fertility clinic as a black box, and say that it prevents delivering embryos recommended for implantation which are prone to schizophrenia, that would also be correct... )
It's not just the defective ones, though. Maybe 5 have higher risk for schizophrenia, but of the other 5, do we choose randomly, or do we perhaps select for intelligence or blondeness or something else?
How many times do I have to roll 6 3d6 in order, before I find a keeper?
Well, according to Scott there's a whole other dimension of embryo selection that has nothing to do with how desirable the genetic package it contains is, but involves assessing the health and normalcy of the embryo itself. So at this point what would really happen would be that any remaining selection would be determined by the health of the embryo itself. But in the future I'm sure we'll have the luxury of selecting for other traits too. Yeah, I suppose most people will select for tall, thin, (white, of course, that goes without saying), blond and smart. You know, an Aryan. Someone the American neo-nazi's would warm up to on sight. The California Cryo guy who was chosen by so many women that he had like 100 offspring was a tall blond philosophy major.
I can never get anyone to take any interest in my idea that it's important to select for empathy and low propensity for violence.
> I can never get anyone to take any interest in my idea that it's important to select for empathy and low propensity for violence.
I think there's a bit of a collective action problem there. :-(
Wait, what's a collective action problem? You mean diffusion of responsibility -- like lots of people of agree, but nobody's making any effort to promote the idea? If so, I don't think that's what it is. I think many people here truly think the key to making the world better is having more smart people and fewer dumber ones, and that "niceness" (their mildly derogatory and somewhat inaccurate idea of what I'm talking about) is not very important. And some have actually said to me that if you go for hi IQ you capture hi empathy anyhow. No you don't. There's just a weak positive correlation. And then I get the sense that a lot of people think I'm being sort of woke -- like everybody gets to win prizes here, and if we have prizes for IQ, we should also have one for Niceness, and for being good at baking cakes, and for being able to run fast, everybody's brilliant at something kind of thing.
NO, that's not where I'm coming from. I really think a 10% increase in the number of gentle and highly empathic people in Israel and Palestine would have made the last year there much less awful. I think making the leaders there 10% more gentle and empathic would help more than making them all 10% smarter.
If you insisted to me that the 'kill all 65 year olds' approach was preventing a bunch of deaths from cancer and heart disease, I don't think I'd disagree though. So your intuitions about language here may not be such a home run.
Well, I'm not convinced my intuitions are a home run, just feel more that the way Scott's talking is an odd use of 'prevent.' It's not *wrong,* exactly -- you see what he means -- just an odd use of the word. In this case of this piece, it seems like an odd use of the word 'prevent' whose purpose is to make discarding embryos with a lot of bad genes more palatable. His use is 'prevent' is maybe sort of comparable to someone's calling SSRI's a birth control drug, because they often cause sexual dysfunction. It's not not *wrong* exactly. It's quite possible that fertility rates are lower for people with that SSRI side effect. But it's a nonstandard, maybe sort of playful use of the term 'birth control.' The listener might think of it as the speaker joking around a bit as he makes his complaint about the SSRI side effect.
Likewise, suppose I said to you, "there's been a breakthrough! Someone has discovered how to prevent most cancers in people aged 60+." "What is it?" you ask, astonished and eager to hear the answer. "Kill them all at 65," I say. You'd get the logic of it, the way it's sort of true, but you'd be likely to take my response as sort of a dark joke. Or imagine there's a contest, where researchers and anyone else who wants to submits ideas for preventing cancer in people aged 60+, and I submitted my "prevention" plan. Unless somebody in the contest had just discovered a novel and highly effective cancer preventive or treatment, my idea would probably win, right? But don't you think most people would consider that unfair? Like it's not really prevention in the sense the contest was talking about?
Am I right in thinking we don't currently have the technology to harvest some eggs and sperm from a couple, genetically screen the eggs and sperm individually, and then make a single IVF embryo from a "winning" pair?
If we did, I'm curious to see how that would change people's intuitions and moral calculus. I expect those who believe that life begins at conception and that screening and discarding embryos is a bit like screening and killing babies would be OK with this alternative, and those who object to schizophrenia screening on disability-rights grounds would not, and those who object to it on the grounds of playing God or meddling with fate also would not.
I am vaguely in the first camp (although not militantly, and I acknowledge it can be the lesser of two evils), and I would be basically OK with the technology described above and consider it to be much better morally than making 10 embryos and discarding 9 of them, whether randomly or based on screening. (Although, secondarily, I also have some slight qualms about the future society-wide effects if people are allowed to fully customise their kids' genetic makeup).
I wonder where does this intuition come from? What is so special about the union of the gametes that changes the moral calculus from "non-issue" (discarding millions of gametes to pick the best ones) to "murder" (discarding a few embryos)? If you look under the microscope there isn't really anything interesting going on during fertilization. Just some wiggling sperms, then the acrosome reaction occurs, the cortical granules fuse, and voila, you have a zygote. Where is this "life" they are talking about? Aren't gametes also alive? If so, why is the life of zygote so much more special than the life of gametes? It's so puzzling.
Yes, the argument is that the line is drawn when it is a living thing with a full set of human DNA, ie an embryo. It is a pretty logical line (I believe it to be the most logical of the different possible options). You may not agree with it but I you should at least be able to understand it.
The zygote is, biologically, the very first stage of human development. Its the moment when an individual human life starts. Before fertilization you have Adam's sperm cells and Betty's egg, afterwards you have baby Cindy.
This is a biological fact, and is not scientifically controversial. Naturally you can understand that a zygote is an individual human life and still believe it doesn't have rights or isn't worthy of moral consideration.
I would disagree. The zygote is not the first step, it is one of many steps on the path from the parental generation to the filial generation. The haploid gamete is a individual entity, with a unique genome that is a step away from parental diploid form. The diploid zygote formed from gametes is another individuating step away from the parental forms. It's all little molecular machines doing their stuff, so that months later a new person may emerge.
Of course I understand that the zygote is an individual human life, like any human cell, haploid, diploid or syncytium. As I said, what I really do not understand is why so many people get hung up on the "individual human life" thing. Life is not thought. A cell is not a person. Every human cell has a unique genome because every mitosis introduces a few random mutations. Who cares! Persons matter, not "lives".
>Every human cell has a unique genome because every mitosis introduces a few random mutations.
Many Thanks! Yup, I made the same point in one of the other subthreads.
The zygote is the first stage of development for any human: before that point there is no organism to develop further. An egg is not an organism, nor is a sperm, but a fertilized egg is.
This is obvious if you look at any other animal species: nobody argues that fox sperm are individual foxes, or that there is no first stage of development for elephants. The only reason people bend out of their way to argue that it's different for humans is the abortion issue. You yourself say "Who cares! Person's matter, not "lives"": well, if it's personhood that really matters then why argue all this ballyhoo about a zygote not being the first step of human development? Why not just say "Yes, a zygote is the first stage of human development but it does not have the qualities necessary to be a person be worthy of moral consideration." That's a perfectly respectable position: yet instead you try to argue that personhood is what matters, and also the zygote is not a member of H. Sapiens.
You can't sequence a sperm cell on its own without destroying it as each sperm cell only has one copy of each chromosome (unless the father has macrozoospermia, in which case it has 4 but that makes you infertile as you'd expect).
"Am I right in thinking we don't currently have the technology to harvest some eggs and sperm from a couple, genetically screen the eggs and sperm individually, and then make a single IVF embryo from a winning pair?"
Yes, this is correct. It's very disappointing, because if you're lucky you can get ~10 eggs, but you can get 300 million sperm. If we could genotype individual sperm, we could definitely select for whatever crazy out-of-distribution traits we wanted.
IIRC we do have this technology for sperm, since X-chromosome sperm have a higher mass than Y-chromosome sperm, and you can separate them with a centrifuge.
Yes, but that's just determining which sperm carry an X and which carry a Y. Actually genotyping or sequencing the genome that sperm carries isn't possible without destroying it.
I believe that technically is "genotyping," just in the crudest possible way.
OK, sorry for not being clear enough. Let me explain. "Genotyping" is a generic term for checking a specific genomic feature. Yes, it can refer to X/Y presence, but it normally refers to looking for specific single nucleotide variants. That's what is used when calculating a polygenic risk score - you need to know the variants in multiple ("poly") locations. Currently it is not possible to look at DNA at the base level without wrecking the cell carrying it. If that cell happens to be the only cell carrying the DNA you want to look at - in this case, the sperm - then you cannot have your cell and genotype it.
Every argument in this post would suggest that sex-selective IVF and/or abortion is OK. These are typically seen as morally repugnant - and are serious criminal offenses where I live. Is Scott willing to bite that bullet?
Being pro-choice doesn't mean viewing a foetus as having no rights. It's perfectly possible to think a foetus has rights, but - for example - in the difficult situation where the baby is unwanted, the mother's rights have priority. Similarly, being pro-IVF in the tragic situation where a couple would otherwise be infertile doesn't mean being pro-IVF always and for any reason.
The strongest argument is that if you're doing IVF anyway, you may as well screen for schizophrenia. But if that is allowed, then couples who would otherwise conceive naturally will use IVF. So you're not "doing IVF anyway," in aggregate.
The whole post is full of the kind of analogical reasoning that Scott would normally reject. What happened to utilitarianism? Why isn't the question "Are we better off as a society if this is permitted?"
No, because nobody here considers being (fe)male as a negative. For any disease that we can agree on is sufficiently bad, I don't see how a utilitarist calculus of polygenic screening comes out as anything but positive (though I'm admittedly not really an utilitarist). An imbalanced sex ratio on the other hand is pretty straightforward bad.
[Scott voice] Who says we'd get an imbalanced sex ratio? People who want daughters will get daughters, people who want sons will get sons. And if a couple really want a daughter, it's definitely worse for them, and the baby, to get a son. You're doing the screening anyway, may as well select for parental wishes.[/Scott voice]
Of course, while such selection may seem OK in theory at first blush, in practice people will select boys, akin to the 100 Million Missing Women. And this should make us look again at the theory, and realise that encouraging sex selection - or selection in general - isn't theoretically sound to begin with.
Sure, that's true in the case of sex. Allowing selection for it is pretty much all downside no upside in practice. But there is no equivalent for serious, debilitating diseases; 10.000 Missing Schizophrenics would only be a tragedy in the case of already-existing people. Having less schizophrenics and more non-schizophrenics born is an unalloyed good, the same way there is no tragedy of 10.000 Missing Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
The 10,000 missing schizotypes would be a tragedy, in that having fewer people who answer yes to questions like “Do you have strong feelings or beliefs that are very important to you, about such things as religion, philosophy, or politics?”, “Do you daydream a lot or find yourself preoccupied with stories, fantasies, or ideas?”, and “Do you feel you have special gifts or talents?” would really suck. Schizophrenia PRS is not just about "developing schizophrenia"!
This is as silly as saying there is no downside to happy families in the sex selection question. You have to analyse the result of instituting the proposed rule, not the "results" of the benefits you hope to obtain. The fact that you think that allowing selection for schizophrenia is positive in practice, when it basically doesn't exist, speaks volumes.
> Of course, while such selection may seem OK in theory at first blush, in practice people will select boys, akin to the 100 Million Missing Women.
Edit: my previous comment was callously worded, so I'm going to try to re-state what I was going for.
It is not a given for all people, in general, to overwhelmingly select boys.
First off, people are allowed to have preferences. Most couples will have normal reasons, like "I don't feel equipped to handle a boy/girl," for whatever reason. Some couples will be more sinister about it, and will abuse any kids who happen to be born the "wrong" sex. If sex-selection were banned, there *will* be such children. That is a direct cost of a ban. The last thing I'd want to do is force a little girl to grow up in a family that does not value women.
I don't support limiting the benign couples, because freedom. I *definitely* don't support limiting the sinister couples, because harm reduction. Any ban on sex-selection better be worth this massive downside, and it better prevent some serious societal problems.
And... I don't think there is a strong enough preference for boys in the West in order for this to become a societal problem. We don't have male primogeniture or any of the other extremely strong socioeconomic incentives that prioritize sons over daughters elsewhere. In places that *do* have this attitude, and *have* been overwhelmingly selecting sons for multiple generations, a curious thing has been happening: yes, there's a demographic crisis, but also - daughters are now more valuable. Young women have gained social status/been able to pick better partners, much more than they otherwise would have in generations prior. This is most pronounced among the (upper) middle class in China right now. The families that chose daughters (and the accompanying attitudes that value daughters) are gaining social status. I predict that this feedback loop will self-correct the lopsided "male preference" attitude within a couple more generations.
So no, I don't think a ban on sex-selection is warranted. The potential "societal impacts" are overblown. And even in places that *do* have this problem, it seems to be self-correcting. It's not worth curtailing parents' choices to try to prevent some nebulous problem that we don't really have.
Yes - we can imagine circumstances where people wouldn't (on net) preferentially abort girls. But we need to deal with the world as it is. If a society had tolerant attitudes, what use would they have for sex-selective abortions or screenings? It seems like a practice that can only be used for evil, so is justly banned.
No - I don't wish for "poetic justice" on individuals or societies with beliefs you deem "terrible." I don't know that any of us is so wise that we haven't gone wrong somewhere. It seems foolish to hope fools get their comeuppance, and I hope you overcome your self-limiting belief before it causes you too many problems.
My PTSD agrees that my enemies should suffer for their horrible beliefs, but also thinks that your method of passively hoping for poetic justice is privileged, cowardly, and short-sighted. Think of all the people you could save from suffering if you directly eliminated those horrible beliefs right now!
The rest of me would like to refer you to one of the containment threads, to see the inevitable outcome.
Agreed on all points. Also, carrying and raising a child is an _enormous_ effort, costly in time, in attention, physiologically for the mother, and financially (which is why I, personally, am childfree - particularly due to the time sink component of cost). Given how much parents will invest in their child, I'm happy to see them have all the options science can give them for selecting the child they wish to raise. To the extent "designer babies" are feasible, I'm happy for parents to have that option.
See my response to Marybeth above: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/who-does-polygenic-selection-help/comment/50178928
Another example situation: Natural fertilisation. When medical doctors explain that before fertilisation, only functional sperm reaches the egg, and then in the first week(s) of pregancy a dysfunctional foetus will often naturally be aborted, pretty much nobody ever thinks that this is a tragedy, that we should allow all those sperm to fertilize eggs no matter how dysfunctional they are. Or that we should try to develop technology to forcibly get a dysfunctional foetus to be carried to term despite the body trying to abort it.
We put a lot of effort into keeping dysfunctional babies alive, I think the reason we don't put effort into keeping dysfunctional embryos alive is that it's much harder to do and is a less visible problem, not that we don't consider embryonic humans valuable: they're certainly valuable to the woman trying to conceive!
I'm not sure of the detail of 1 . Aren't eggs all produced at the initial development of the ovary, not once a month? Given that the body must then choose ~1 each month to ovulate, it's plausible that it does so by ovulating them in some predefined order, so that the choice not to drink doesn't affect which egg is ovulated. A better argument would be that everything affects which sperm ends up fertilising the egg.
I think this dilemma is sharpest if you think about people wanting to select against deafness. Deaf people who are part of signing culture often believe that deaf culture is valuable and not merely an adaptation, and (congenital) deafness should be considered a variation not a disability. As such they would argue that selection is immoral. I don't know any deaf people so I have not thought about this much, but I guess the best argument would be that the decision to select in the first place is the immoral step, not that the step of selection is discriminating against individual deaf embryos. But I don't know how a deaf person would actually argue.
"I'm not sure of the detail of 1 . Aren't eggs all produced at the initial development of the ovary, not once a month? Given that the body must then choose ~1 each month to ovulate, it's plausible that it does so by ovulating them in some predefined order, so that the choice not to drink doesn't affect which egg is ovulated. A better argument would be that everything affects which sperm ends up fertilising the egg."
This is why I claimed that the rehab took three months.
Ah, I'd missed that conception took place at a different time in the counterfactual. Yes, I see the argument works.
Not alone conception, you need to stay sober during pregnancy. No point being sober until you conceive, then going out and getting wasted every weekend for the next nine months.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/fetal-alcohol-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20352901
Selecting against schizophrenic embryos would be systematic, whereas Situations 1 and 3 here just randomly re-roll what baby ends up being made. Situation 2 is slightly selective - I assume the healthiest embryo is chosen to maximise odds of surviving pregnancy? If so I suppose that only makes sense, but if they're being selected to be taller/smarter/etc. as children/adults that makes me uncomfortable too.
I don't mind an action changing what baby is made so long as it's a random re-roll of the die, but if we start normalising the systematic prevention of certain types embryos that would've been babies due to their 'worse genes', where does it end? People will start selecting their children for all the high-status traits such as intelligence, height, and so on.
Some of this is clearly Molochian: when everyone defects and selects an embryo to be taller, we'll simply find that the old desired heights like 6 foot 1 simply become the new 'short' lower-status heights. Desiring greater height is about wanting to be taller than peers, not being taller absolutely. And height is correlated with shorter life-expectancy, so this purely harms everyone's children for the sake of not being left in the dust by everyone else's defection.
Selection for intelligence seems very risky: would speed up AGI development.
But more generally, if people start heavily selecting their children for all sorts of traits (perhaps even using CRISPR and the like for some genetic engineering) then - assuming we haven't gone extinct a while from now - will we not just select ourselves out of existence, into some new species? It reminds me of the thought experiment - I think it was on SSC - where Gandhi could gain a reward by taking a pill to become 99% as good, but he decides not to because then he'd be fine getting another reward for taking a pill that makes him 98% as good, and so on and so forth until he'd be 0% good; and 100% good Gandhi did not want to end up 0% good.
I would like it if humanity stays 100% human, and does not - via some situation where the Ship of Theseus problem meets the slow-boiling frog - slowly replace its genetics (and thus its phenotype) over a timespan too long for it to be bothered with or realise fully the consequences, until our successors have become some creature that is wholly alien to us.
Selection is already happening, all the time. It's just that right now, we're selecting against/for things that we have no say in. Some of these are good - contraceptives selects for parents that actually *want* children as opposed to having them involuntarily - some are pretty bad - contraceptives also selects against cautious people who postpone childrearing until it's too late, and selects for impulsive people who first forgets to take the contraceptive and then decide to keep the child on a whim. Imo the modern world is pretty weird in terms of the things it's selecting for/against. After enough time, all the current selection pressures will also lead to populations almost unrecognizable to our current way of living, just as our current way of living is unrecognizable to people in the far past. I'd prefer if we would have a say in it, since then we at least get a chance to keep the parts we truly care about.
The ability to select an entire generation out of having practically any schizophrenics would be much more rapid and extreme than anything that's been occurring naturally. I can't think of anything similar in our history over even a dozen or so generations, let alone in a single generation. And then of course we can select embryos for all sorts of other things, and we can use genetic engineering to modify them even further.
> After enough time, all the current selection pressures will also lead to populations almost unrecognizable to our current way of living, just as our current way of living is unrecognizable to people in the far past
That is also a problem to me - but again this issue seems a lot further in the future. Homo sapiens has existed for hundreds of thousands of years; presumably natural breeding will not exterminate us that rapidly. (Though I have heard theories that our evolution has been rapidly accelerating since the Agricultural Revolution.)
> I'd prefer if we would have a say in it, since then we at least get a chance to keep the parts we truly care about.
I suppose I actually agree with this - maybe my main concern is less the selection itself and more who is doing it, and thus what will be done. If we hypothetically had a highly-competent government which only selected embryos to be healthier (fewer genetic heart diseases, less likely to develop schizophrenia, etc.) I would not mind this.
(Indeed it could be good not only for health but to ensure the human race doesn't drift into being some other species over even a very long timescale - thereby solving the issue mentioned in the 2nd paragraph of this comment.)
My concern is mostly individuals being allowed to select embryos for their own children. This would lead to height-selection (which as aforementioned, seems that when done by everyone it harms all and helps none), and selection for all sorts of other things like exotic eye-colors and God knows what other bodily modifications in order to try to give social-status to the baby-to-be.
"The ability to select an entire generation out of having practically any schizophrenics would be much more rapid and extreme than anything that's been occurring naturally."
Sure, but are we *sure* we can guarantee that? I see Down's Syndrome children brought up in comments here, and there isn't a way to stop any more Down's Syndrome merely by polygenic selection, you have to constantly do that (or abortion, if you're not doing pre-pregnancy selection) to have 'no more Down's Syndrome children'.
And that's a crap shoot, too; at my place of work, the child with Down's Syndrome then got a younger sibling who was perfectly normal. Same parents, mother was older by two or three years when she got pregnant the second time, different outcomes.
I wonder if there is a magic cure - we know *these* genes and *these* alone cause schizophrenia! - to be found here, such that by preventing offspring carrying those genes from being born, we'll get rid of schizophrenia in three generations. I think we might find out "hang on, there are still schizophrenics, how is *that* happening?"
If you know better, please inform me! I am interested to learn these things.
Yetch!!! So you want to forbid
>individuals being allowed to select embryos for their own children
and allow
>government which only selected embryos
This is _exactly_ the coercive dystopia.
The difference between the selection of the low-risk embryo and Situation 1, the Alcoholic, is that in the initial example, you already have ten embryos created and in existence. In the case of the Alcoholic, she isn't pregnant yet. "Stop drinking before you get pregnant" is not the same thing as "You're pregnant with triplets, you drunk, now pick two to abort on the basis that one might be less retarded than the others".
The reason that Situation 1 is not the same thing at all, that this is not "preventing FAS = preventing schizophrenia", is because there is no existing life (we can argue about moral worth of embryos later, but can we at least accept that these are living cells with the potential to become babies?) in Situation 1 - the alcoholic isn't being asked to submit ten embryos and we'll implant the one without FAS. The alcoholic isn't pregnant at all yet! The situations are not comparable.
The way they *would* be comparable is if in both cases, the doctor says to schizophrenic genes parents "Given your family history, if you conceive a child, there's a high risk of schizophrenia" and to the alcoholic "Given your history of alcohol abuse, if you conceive a child, there's a high risk of FAS" and then the parents in both instances have to make a decision.
Outcome in Situation 1 is only the same if the Alcoholic says "But doc, I love getting drunk, I don't want to give up drinking. Tell you what, I'll do IVF and you pick which embryo isn't a retard, okay?"
She has a relatively easy solution to her problem - get sober and stay sober before and during pregnancy. The gene-carriers don't have an easy solution, they can't abstain from anything or take anything which will allow them to have 'non-schizophrenic genes gametes'. 'Preventing schizophrenia' and 'preventing FAS' are not at all the same thing here. In one case, you're asking "don't bring a child into existence while you're a drunk", in the other you have "ten potential children exist, we must destroy nine" to avoid the problematic pregnancy.
> Selection for intelligence seems very risky: would speed up AGI development.
It's the opposite, I think. Smarter humans have less need for AI, and are better able to solve coordination problems, including the coordination problem that is "nobody develop better AI". If we manage to push the boundaries of human intelligence, or even just roll more geniuses until we get lucky, we may well get someone(s) who can solve AI alignment or work out a way to merge with our AIs so that the future remains fundamentally human.
I think this prospect unnerves me a little (not enough to oppose it straightforwardly), but I think I figured out what my unease is from.
At this point, polygenic selection is straightforwardly good. It gets a little less good when the technology improves enough to predict things like personality traits.
Wouldn't it be bad if parents had an outsized control over the inherent traits of their children? Hypothetically you have parents that want a child for less noble reasons (maybe they want a live in servant that is forever tied to them, plenty of abusive parents treat their kids like this).
Are you able to stop them from selecting an embryo that is more likely to be gullible and easy to manipulate? Are you able to stop them from picking an embryo born with a chronic condition that is treatable with medicine, so that the parents always have the leash with which to control the kid and train them into a kind of house slave?
Dipping into the realm of celebrity gossip, there's some fairly credible rumours that a supermodel, whose mother was a supermodel, was forced to get a rhinoplasty at 14 and also ended up with disordered eating from maintaining the body shape. While she has a very successful modelling career, it's pretty clear that she didn't really choose to be a model and mostly just got pressured into it. Imagine if this mother had access to genetic engineering. What's to stop wealthy obsessive supermodel types like this woman from engineering humans like pugs - attractive, with lots of health problems linked to the appearance based breeding, and then forcing them to do as the parent wishes?
Yes, these are really hypothetical problem right now. What can we do to stop parents from infringing on the rights of future people, when the technology becomes viable?
In conclusion - it's great to use this tech for chronic incurable health issues currently. I think we need to really formalise rights of children before it gets to the point where parents get full control of every aspect of unborn children, because it could get really bad.
Yeah, I'm possibly a bit more liberal than you here because I think IQ selection would be really good, but I also draw the line at other personality traits.
If I were Czar, I'd allow health and IQ related outcomes, but ban most personality related selection until we had a better idea what's going on. If the coalitions end up being "ban all" vs. "allow all", I think I'm on the allow all side, but I'll grumble about it.
Does this mean that you believe relative intelligence dictates to some extent the value of human life?
Would you then consider an AI of super-human intelligence to be of greater value - or its existence more "sacred" (for lack of a better word) - than a human being with an IQ of, say, 90?
Same here. Albeit my experience with GPT4 has me _hoping_ that we get at least to AGI, but not holding my breath :-(
I'll go off on a tangent here and point out that sometimes slaves were bought for their intelligence (classically, Greek tutors), but other times they were bought for other reasons and their intelligence was irrelevant or merely needed to be above a minimum. So yes, lives can be and have been valued for intelligence. But there's no single "value"; all potential buyers have their own criteria. And sellers get better prices when the market is larger, because they can target the buyer who assigned the most value.
Anyway, I think Scott clearly puts a high value on intelligence. If you think the world would be a better place if everyone were a bit smarter, or if no one were too stupid, then you do too. (There are other traits that are probably good overall, but I think rationalists view intelligence as a meta-trait that allows better identification of valuable traits.) And one can say "I like chocolate" without wanting to genetically engineer the rest of the human species to crave chocolate at every moment, and without converting the entire universe into a ball of chocolate, and without wanting to build a chocolate calf for the people to worship.
Don't you like chocolate?
If I say that to see is preferable to being blind, does it imply that an AI with a camera is more valuable than a blind human?
Intelligence is an advantage for a human in the same way the eyesight is. For many other traits, there seems to be some trade-off, so it would be potentially dangerous to move the entire society one way. But low intelligence seems to have no advantages per se.
I wouldn't have an issue with intelligence. My main concern is parents deliberately kneecapping future children to make them easier to control. Better health and intellect is the opposite of that - the child would be able to perceive better options and escape routes, so I'm fine with that.
>My main concern is parents deliberately kneecapping future children to make them easier to control.
I agree that that would be bad. If a couple is willing to do that, I'd expect that they generally don't have their child's best interests at heart. I doubt that the genetic option changes the situation all that much. There are lots of abusive parents out there, and not all that much that can be done about them without creating coercive invasive government control that is often worse.
People vary a lot in this test of how accurate they are at reading other people's emotions: https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
This test is well thought of. It has only a low positive correlation with intelligence. People with autism score poorly on it, but so do various others. Seems to me that ability to grasp what others are feeling is part of being empathic. The other part is resonating to what they feel, rather than simply using the info you've gleaned for some end of your own. And I'd also throw in a low propensity for violence and rage. Do these traits tend to co-occur? It seems to me they do, but I have not looked atthe research. Is there evidence that these traits are heritable. I don't know.
But nobody even seems curious about it. I simply cannot understand why everyone thinks that it is far more important to select for IQ than for empathy and gentleness -- traits that are likely to lead to less crime, torture, exploitation of others, murder and war. Is it that people think the amount of person-on-person violence is not that high? WTF? Is it that people think that the solution to war and cruelty is tech, because tech solves problems like hunger that might otherwise drive people to war, etc, and so we need more smart people to producer more tech breakthroughs?
Tech's a pretty indirect solution. Case in point: The present discussion, which concerns a very expensive, tech-heavy medical procedure that could save parents from having a schizophrenic child. It's a perfect example of cool tech that is going to help most of the world not at all. It will be available only to the wealthy for quite a while, I'd say. That's a demonstration of why tech is not as great as one might think at reducing people's cruelty to each other by reducing hunger, illness, etc.
Very interesting test! Somehow I got 27/36 correct. I'm not totally opposed to your argument here but I do have a few counterpoints.
1) Is it gentleness and empathy we need to upregulate, or sociopathy we need to downregulate? It seems to me that the upstream problem is sociopaths creating Molochian situations, in which normies then struggle to act with kindness to others.
2) Have you seen the famous 4chan image about anon researches IQ?
https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/s/f0Xd87MSPT
The basic argument is that a significant fraction of humanity lacks the intellectual horsepower to model another person's mind, and are thus functionally sociopathic. See also the meme of asking someone whether they had breakfast. If this argument is true, then higher IQ will lead to more empathy.
About downregulating sociopaths: The eyes test doesn't measure the quality I'm talking about, just a part of it: perceiving how others are feeling. The other part of what I'm calling empathy is *caring* what others are feeling. Probably many sociopaths are good at the first part. To be a successful con artist you have to be good at seeing how your mark is feeling and thinking. I don't know what tests there are tests of the kind of perceptive empathy I have in mind, though I'm sure there are some, or what's known about how heritable the trait is.
About the 4chan stuff: IMO the person who wrote that is pretty dumb about people. Before we even get to the examples, consider this: If an adult has an IQ between 80 & 90 , their performance on IQ tests is going to be like that of a 10-12 year old of average intelligence. So could a kid that age answer the question "if somebody heard her son had been killed, how do you think she would feel?" Of course they could, right? So I dunno what's going on with the people tested who were unable to answer these questions, but it's not that their intellectual functioning is so poor that they cannot form a model of how a person would feel or think in certain situations where to most of us the answer would be obvious.. Maybe they have a special deficit, separate from general intelligence, in understanding other's feelings. Maybe they have trained themselves not to contemplate other's feelings. Maybe they just hate the question because they feel like it's an exercise in making them feel guilty. You can say the same about most of the other questions on the page-- normal 10-12 year olds could answer them. Therefore, if these people cannot answer them the explanation is not that their general intelligence is too low.
Here’s a chart from an article about the ability of kids in kindergarten through 4th grade to answer theory of mind questions correctly. https://imgur.com/a/bYpoAaS (The Development of Advanced Theory of Mind in Middle Childhood: A Longitudinal Study From Age 5 to 10 Years
https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13627)
Note that recursion is on there, and so is double bluffing, and 3-level false beliefs (A incorrectly believes that B incorrectly believes the C incorrectively believes X.)
The writer said more than 50% of those tested were illiterate. So were these questions delivered orally? For some of them, for instance the recursion question about stories within stories, I think *I* might struggle a bit if it was delivered orally. Hearing it once I’d get the gist, but probably would lose some details about how many characters had to be in each level of story-within-story, and how many lines of dialogue each had to speak. So I would probably have asked the examiner to repeat the question a time or 2. Did these subjects? My guess is that they would not. So these subjects either had the question delivered orally or, if they were not illiterate, had to read it. Seems likely that the ones not illiterate would have poor reading skills, and would not be great at taking in these instructions, which are not simple.
I’m a psychologist and have talked to many people with IQ’s in the 80-90 range. If you want to find out what they can do mentally, you have to make sure they understand the question. Otherwise, you’re simultaneously testing their ability to grasp the instructions and their ability to follow them, and the result is confounded. Normally tests are set up so that all subjects are able to understand the questions. If you have to give a test that is not really set up for the subjects you have, you have to adapt it.So for instance for question 1, I’d initially ask it the original way, then if they seemed not to understand the question I might say: Did you eat breakfast and lunch yesterday? (Yes, they say). So let’s say you could go back in time to yesterday morning and live yesterday again. Know what I mean? (Yes, they say). So let’s pretend that you lived yesterday morning exactly the same way you did before, except that you skipped breakfast and lunch. Can you picture that? (Yes). So how do you think you would be feeling in the evening of this yesterday? (Starving). AND, once I’d taken them through the first question that way, they would probably no longer need all the scaffolding, but could answer questions of this kind if they were stated simply. So what I was doing the first time through was teaching them to understand the question.
Obviously, people with extremely low IQ’s really aren’t able to understand even simple things about what other people would feel in a certain situation. But it is completely untrue that people in the 80-100 range cannot do that. I don’t know wtf is wrong with the person who wrote this page. The testing they were doing in prison makes me thing they were a grad student in psychology. Psychologists all know the stuff I’ve explained here about theory of mind and the abilities of people in the low to low-average IQ range..
I’m curious if you think that parents selecting for higher intelligence is something that would be uniformly distributed over the range of the intelligence of the parents?
I.e. would allowing this tend to shift the distribution of intelligence uniformly to the right? Or would people of lower or average intelligence be less inclined to make that choice (even assuming, say, that the procedure is free and equally available to everyone), resulting in a bimodal distribution where the smart people produce even smarter children but the rest do not?
I’m not saying the latter would necessarily be *bad*, but it would certainly upend a lot of societal assumptions. (Of course, recent trends in choosing mates may get us there regardless, though probably not as quickly.)
It might also compress the range, at least at the top. Fixing well-understood failure modes, while sometimes hard, is often easier than improving the functioning of a system that is reasonably well tuned.
I submit to you - who cares? I mean, this whole argument is "what if people select on crappy traits I don't like?"
Right now, crappy parents are propagating their crappy traits, willy-nilly. Not only that, but crappy people are generally only able to breed with OTHER crappy people who introduce *whole new forms of crappiness* into their mutual kids! It's madness!
You're pointing to a far out edge case that might affect 1 in 10k or 1 in 100k polygenically selected kids with crappy traits you don't like. The current crappy-traits-from-parents dynamic is fully 50-80% of ALL parents. Which is the worse scenario?
Not to mention that most people care about their grandkids, at the minimum - if you're selecting for brainless servants, your line will either extinguish or become brainless servants, and most people aren't going to be happy with that outcome.
If you're selecting for attractiveness as in the supermodel scenario, that's a GOOD thing - the bad thing was the crappy parenting afterwards, about which I once again submit to you that crappy parenting is the dominant case today, so who cares?
The argument is not "what if people select on crappy traits". The argument is "what if people use trait selection to engineer a population they can control easily".
At the moment, if you're a child born to abusive controlling parents, the extent of their control ends at nature. They can tell you lies, but if you're born inquisitive and clever, you can see through them and slowly struggle free.
People who weren't smart enough aren't so lucky, and I consider that a tragedy. But the moment parents have the ability to actively ensure that their kids are too dumb to resist manipulation is where it goes into horror territory for me.
The ability to design your children has the power to shift the parental demographic! Currently, the very self interested people won't have kids, because it's very high risk, high effort with very uncertain pay off. If you can choose your kid, the calculus will shift - you'd select for an anxious kid who will rarely assert their needs, gullible (low effort), and loyal (high reward). You have maybe one or two of these dumb slave kids, then have one that you actually want to continue your line. It's perfectly logical - have some low effort kids you don't care about, and exploit their labour to raise the high effort kid that you do care about. You and your high effort kids can sterilise the idiots easily.
I think the overall state of the gene pool is irrelevant to the fact that people will now be able to create people who may lead lives of unimaginable suffering, optimising for some random trait that is orthogonal to actually being happy. If you can give someone anorexia from birth I don't doubt some parents would be stupid or vain enough to try.
>the fact that people will now be able to create people who may lead lives of unimaginable suffering, optimising for some random trait that is orthogonal to actually being happy
I mean, this is just "crappy traits" with a tiny bit more specificity. What do you think *makes* a trait crappy? It produces suffering in the people who have it. Right now, that's the human condition and the dominant paradigm - the ONLY way out of this current "crappily suffering" paradigm is gengineering! Propensity to diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, etc - all suffering. Being able to reach beyond that, and being able to create healther, stronger, smarter humans at scale, is going to require gengineering.
Sure, you point to an impossibly long-tail fictional edge case of people breeding several mindless slaves to raise their one "real" kid. Let's just take it as given that this is a significant problem, and say, 5% of gengineering parents do this. Well, how do you think their one "real" kid is going to do in the world? They either have the genes for psychopathy in them (if the parents chose that), or not. If they don't, they're a regular person who isn't going to propagate any unnecessary suffering. If they do have the genes for psychopathy, they're not going to succeed or breed as much as the 99% of other parents breeding healthy, high IQ, cooperative kids who understand game theory and the power of coordination, and will be outcompeted unto extinction.
On the balance of civlizational and human suffering, which arm is bigger? The heart disease / diabetes / cancer / mental illness arm, currently affecting approximately everyone, or the "exceptionally psychopathic parents could create literal slaves for children" arm, which has basically nobody?
"99% of other parents breeding healthy, high IQ, cooperative kids who understand game theory and the power of coordination"
The unquestioning faith in the miracles of science on display here has me laughing. I'll stick to praying to St. Anne and St. Gerard Majella for optimum outcomes around childbirth, it's just as good as "our Midwich Cuckoos will be superhuman, I tell you, but *nice* superhumans!"
If they understand game theory, they may decide that being a freerider gives them immediate advantage and that is worth more to them than the long term 'let's all hold hands and agree to cut the pie into equal slices' decisions.
I disagree with the way you characterise crap traits, because there are situations where these set of traits would be perfectly fine - or even a net benefit to have.
In fact, it's a net benefit to be a hard worker who bonds easily with other people and wants to minimise conflict in an environment where people aren't assholes! This person tends to be well-loved in their community, and since they're usually very easy to love, they tend to attract the protection of their community - provided that they started out in a loving family, where people around them looked out for their best interests and helped them develop some basic boundaries and recognise bad actors.
It's not fair to bundle "someone who can be abused given [starting conditions]" with diabetes and cancer. I definitely agree that we should take any measure to prevent diseases that cause a burden on life.
If it helps, I'm thinking about this somewhat philosophically - if there are steps to this technology, I'm fully onboard with the "cure cancer", "cure SIDS", etc steps, but I do think there are steps beyond (eg engineer specific personality traits) which need to be seriously considered before the technology actually gets there.
I think the approach probably involves considering the rights of children and formalising parental responsibilities to something that includes the best lifelong interests of children, maybe something including the right of independence or something.
So by all means, do the work to select for less likely to have congenital heart failure. But we also need to do the work to prevent the tech from getting abused down the road.
Generally parents are benevolent towards their children. Out love is pure, we really want what is best for them. Do you feel that a significant percentage of parents would choose to breed their children into slaves? How many percent would act in this way? 10%? 1%?
A blanket ban on parental choice of embryos would be throwing 99 babies away with the bathwater for every one that you (theoretically) save from abuse.
I guess the counterpump is that once the precident is set then what other conditions can a couple choose to select for at IVF? The sex of the baby? What if they have a religion that considers schizophrenics to be prophets and so they want to maximise that chance? What if they're convinced the most important thing for humanity is to maximise genetic diversity and so they want to select the one with the most genetic mutation? What if technology develops to the point where we can predict the future personality of the baby and everyone always chooses the same option?
On individual levels, it's a moral problem but at scale some become societal problem because they distort the population.
The obvious answer is to have the state allow certain selections but not others, which is basically where we're at now. But I can see the case that this grants the government a problematic power to decide on the genetic makeup of the population, and that this is a dangerous road to wander down.
I think there is an assumption underlying these discussions that two embryos with different starting genes will grow up to be different people. While a reasonable assumption, I'm not sure this should be taken for granted. Consciousness is poorly understood, but it feels like a 'person' (in the sense of being a sentient entity) may be better defined by the atoms that form its nervous system than by its starting genes.
If the set of molecules that become a nervous system is more robust to genetic variation than we expect, then we wouldn't be creating entirely different people from the same starting embryos. We are only equipping the person with a different set of genes. Viewed this way, then it would definitely be an ethical good to choose the 'best' embryo (assuming this 'best' is well defined).
If this all sounds hand wavy, that's because it is. There are a lot of open questions, like whether what matters is if some subset of molecules form a specific part of the brain, or how many molecule difference it would take for a person to be considered 'different', how much variation there is brain development, etc. However, I think it's important to discuss given how it could drastically change our starting points.
No, but that does not follow from my arguments because clearly a distinct set of molecules form the nervous systems of the two different twins?
Here's the more appropriate thought experiment: Suppose at the point of conception, we are able to branch reality into two. For one reality, we conceive with a control embryo. For the other, we change the genetic code ever so slightly. If the changed embryo had one minor gene knocked out, then it seems reasonable for the changed embryo to grow up to be the same 'person' (in the sense of being the same sentient entity), but with one different trait. If we increase the number of genetic changes, at some point it is possible that a different 'person' (i.e. a different sentient entity) will have been born. What this point is can't really be said for certain - it is possible that 'personness' is very robust to genetic changes, or it may take only a handful of genetic changes for a person to be someone else.
I argue that 'atoms that become a nervous system' is our best guess proxy for personhood (short of relying on arguments from spirits).
If everyone, or even a sizeable fraction of the at-risk population, used polygenic selection to filter against schizoprenia, then within a few generations we might end up "breeding out" an unwanted trait. So arguably every individual couple who chooses that route is also lowering the prevalence of the condition at the population level by a tiny amount.
> An Alabama court made this argument on anti-abortion grounds recently.
I think you have the causation wrong. Instead, both the Alabama decision and anti-abortion are based on life-is-sacred-and-begins-at-conception.
Fair point.
I was going to point out that scenario 1 doesn't work as a response to the argument it's being mustered against, but William H Stoddard has already done that!
Here's my problem with scenario 2:
> It’s true that embryo #5 was briefly destined to be implanted and born and grow into a human being, and that the doctor’s decision caused that not to happen. But almost nobody would consider this an injury done to embryo #5 or consider this to be impermissible meddling in the threads of Fate. Nobody would say that, once the intern had picked #5, it was wrong for the doctor to switch to #7 in the name of health.
I agree that nobody says this. But that's not because they're committed to moral consistency. It's because injuries to embryos don't matter. When similar injuries happen to adults, they are recognized as injuries.
Let's take the example of Miss Universe 2015. Voting (secretly) determined that the winner was Miss Philippines. The MC (publicly) announced that the winner was Miss Colombia. Then, shortly afterward, the MC announced that he had been mistaken the first time, and the winner was in fact Miss Philippines.
Everyone recognizes this as an injury to Miss Colombia. It's not necessarily a big injury, but the MC apologized -- and imagine what people would have thought if he hadn't! -- and faced ongoing jokes about the mishandling of the event.
Drawing an analogy to scenario 2, we see that, at minimum, embryo 5 is owed an apology by the doctor. But really, the injury being dealt to embryo 5 is 𝗳𝗮𝗿 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗲 than the injury that was dealt to Miss Colombia. (I hope that, even though the fact that an injury occurred at all was not immediately obvious, the fact that it is much more severe than the parallel injury to Miss Colombia is obvious!)
This is because living is more important than being named Miss Universe 2015. The difference in severity of the injury that we perceive should correspond directly to the difference in importance between being alive (vs. dead) and being named Miss Universe 2015 (vs. not).
If you believe that embryos have moral weight, then the doctor has committed a very grievous wrong against embryo #5. The reason most people do not believe that the doctor has done so is that they do not assign moral weight to embryos.
You're not exactly disputing my point that "the reason most people do not believe that the doctor has [wronged embryo #5] is that they do not assign moral weight to embryos."
Also, I can understand correcting a misspelling within a quote, but you really shouldn't doctor a quote from someone else to include misspellings that weren't there originally.
Nine out of ten immortal lich-queens agree!
It also doesn't help the argument that the polygenic selection is picking the best embryo. If No. 5 and No. 7 have equal chances of being selected, it just depends who is doing the picking, then you can't meaningfully say No. 7 *is* better. Is the doctor going to review all the selections made by the intern and change them? If not, why not? Why pick *this* selection as being a bad one? It seems random.
And I think that's how polygenic selection will, in fact, work out. Glossy brochure from the clinic promising you best of the best, reality is low paid (by comparison with what it would cost in the USA or Western Europe) technician at a bench processing hundreds of embryos a day according to a checklist, and if there's a slip-up oh well, it's not like the baby is going to be visibly deformed, right? No money back if you didn't get your Nobel Prize winner like you expected, read the fine print!
Explaining tricky issues is one of Scott's great strengths. Here, there is nothing tricky - and if anyone thought there was, the first two examples should have helped. The third one seems "ouch" to me, but I guess there were such comments. - If none of this helped, I doubt anything can.
Example 2 does not make an argument about the definition of prevention but rather the ethics of embryo selection. I think there are two important differences between your examples 1 and 3 and embryo selection.
Firstly, in your examples a different baby being born is incidental rather than crucial for the preventive effect. In Example 1, there is nothing wrong the woman's eggs, there is something wrong with her behavior, which she fixes in rehab. This reduces the risk of her baby to be ill. Similarly, in Example 3, the preventive effect works through an adjustment in behavior, not the selection of the sperm.
Secondly, in Example 1 and 3, different eggs and sperm are used to create the baby but no reasonable person considers eggs and sperm to be human beings, whereas some people do consider embryos to be human beings. Selecting on the "ingredients" for humans may be seen as prevention, whereas selecting on "humans" themselves is not. Once you already have a "human", you can no longer prevent anything, you can only cull the weak!
Let me give you two counterexamples.
1. You bake 2 cakes with two eggs. One of the eggs is rotten. You can either bake both cakes and then smash the cake with the rotten egg in it, or you can simply choose not to bake the second cake and throw the rotten egg away. I think there is a meaningful way in which we can say that the first option does not prevent a bad cake from existing, while the second does.
2. You give birth to several children. Once the youngest is old enough, you give all of them psychological tests. You kill every child with bad scores for schizophrenia. Have you prevented schizophrenia? I guess, in some sense you did. However, I can also appreciate the difference to, say, improving the children's nutrition (or whatever). Culling the weak is different from supporting the weak to get strong.
Example 2 shows that the real argument is about whether an embryo is already a person or not. If you think that it is, and that culling the weak is not really the same as prevention, embryo selection is not prevention.
A broader point on the ethics of embryo selection: Some people might like randomness more than selection when it comes to creating babies for the following reason. If you select against something, that implies that the thing you select against is BAD. This implies that people with the thing are BAD. Therefore, you should treat them as BAD people. But I think that people with thing are GOOD and should be treated as GOOD people. Therefore, selecting against them is BAD.
This type of thinking makes sense if you put things in boxes labeled either GOOD or BAD and then put everything with strong associations with the original thing also in the same box. Personally, I think this type of reasoning is BAD but common. Sometimes it can even lead to opposition to curing a disease because an identity has formed from things in the GOOD box, see e.g. the deaf, HIV positives, and transgenders.
Not that I expect this to convince anyone, but traditionally the argument that life begins at conception comes from the idea of ensoulment. My understanding of the relevant religious arguments is that personhood also flows from ensoulment rather than physical characteristics, including genes (otherwise we have much bigger problems with things like resurrection, or even just radiation). How do we know whether the person conceived was given the same soul or not?
This is only intended as half sarcastic. I really would be interested if anyone has actually thought about this aspect of the question. There is at least significant (and ancient) discussion of the idea that the Abrahamic God sometimes puts a male soul in a female body and vice versa, so it cannot be that genetics fully constrains His choice.
Disclaimer: Devil's advocate post, I entirely think that preventing schizophrenia in this way is a good thing.
This feels like it's ignoring an important point.
The *other* selection criteria are not genetic, but this one is. If we get to a point where everyone uses Bujold-esque artificial wombs, selection by stochastic processes is not going to reduce the specie's genetic variability, but selection by genetic criteria very much would.
Re: the Alabama thing, in Italy we are not allowed to dispose of two frozen embryos even though we *know* they are so badly aneuploid that if implanted they'd get miscarried within weeks -- we will just have to pay €200/year to keep them frozen until Italian lawmakers realize how ridiculous this is or an AI turns us all into paperclips, whichever is first.
How does this work? Does the patient have to pay the money? What happens if they don't?
Huh, it hadn't *occurred* to me to just not pay... I'd guess the fertility clinic would still keep them frozen but sue us for the money?
(By the way, the one euploid embryo we managed to get is now a perfectly healthy beautiful three-month-old boy.)
Congratulations!
Just want to note that you've got the conclusion correct from a pro-life perspective: polygenic selection isn't really any new evil over and above the standard evil that takes place in IVF.
I said to myself I'd keep off this one since it's hot button, but I had to go after this sentence:
"But almost nobody would consider this an injury done to embryo #5 or consider this to be impermissible meddling in the threads of Fate."
*raises hand* Excuse me, Teacher, but I do!
Having stuck my head up, I now skulk back into the grimy recesses of the basket of the deplorables.
Carry on, men (and women and non-binary folx).
EDIT: You know an even better, more fool-proof way of preventing schizophrenia? Voluntary (or involuntary) sterilisation! Take your example couple here: they both have strong family history of schizophrenia, they both are at risk (even if they're not schizophrenic themselves) of having offspring with schizophrenia, and indeed in the example *nine* out of the ten embryos were high-risk! Clearly the best way to prevent another generation of schizophrenia is not to allow them to reproduce. Even if the tenth embryo had been implanted, it would have grown up to still be the generation that has "strong family history of schizophrenia on both sides" and still be a risk - remember, the parents themselves were not schizophrenic but the risk was there, was expressed in the vast majority of their embryos, and you can't know for sure the tenth embryo is totally free or is just as much 'at risk' as their parents of producing schizophrenic offspring if they meet up with the wrong partner and their genetic history.
The best thing for society, for the couple themselves, and even the putative tenth embryo is simply skip the step of reproduction altogether. 100% case of schizophrenia prevention, no risk, no years of worrying about "what if something happens to our child despite all our precautions and it happens?"
> I said to myself I'd keep off this one since it's hot button
And hoo boy were you ever wrong!
I can't help it, I think I have that gene for "fighting on the Internet", can somebody please polygenically select it out for me?
I feel like Gattaca hits on the moral counter argument pretty well here. Choosing "who" is born to this extent could create an artificial and higher bar of expectations. It could untether society's expectations of the individual more than they already are.
Eventually, having a normal birth becomes "immoral" because the quality of life for a randomly born baby is that much lower than for a genetically selected baby. Not because of the baby, but because of society (e.g. the theme of prior posts on perspectives towards disability). Who is "able" enough for society? Genetic selection would take it to a whole new level.
If that happens, then what is the point of normal birth and what does it mean to be human?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
I think if you look at it from the 40k foot view, that "higher standard" is an ineluctable good thing - what does "the human race is progressing and becoming better" mean *except* that?
For the human race overall to improve and expand in capabilities and choices, a higher standard is an inevitable consequence, and is a sign that good things are happening, and in this case, it's happening in the best way, from individual choices on the parts of the parents concerned.
Would you chain humanity to today's average IQ and today's disease and suicide susceptibilities for all time?? Of course not, that's needlessly killing millions or billions over deep time, for literally no benefit.
Are you claiming that humans are inherently good and that technological progress is inherently good because of that?
I'm claiming "the human race progressing and becoming better" is a good thing, but that's certainly a bit of definitional fiat, because it's literally in the sentence.
But I'm pointing out that there are many non-good things about current humanity (viz disease and suicide susceptibilities, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc), and that the road to ameliorating those bad things is going to inevitably raise the standard of human comparison, and that raised standard is a sign that those good things are happening.
>the road to ameliorating those bad things is going to inevitably raise the standard of human comparison, and that raised standard is a sign that those good things are happening.
Agreed. To pick an example that has gone essentially to completion:
"Scurvy crew" is a linguistic fossil _because_ vitamin C was discovered and made widely available. That's good, raised bar notwithstanding!
Yeah so... good and bad are subjective. Your comment present a bit of a false dichotomy for human progress through that black and white lens. The easiest way to deconstruct that is by noting that both people who support effective altruistm and people who support genocide will say that it is "making the human race better".
I agree that change does happen and I don't take a subjective stance of the "goodness" of technology prior to comprehensive real world evidence to its benefit. And even them, I am skeptical because I have worked in a data and resaerch and I understand that knowledge is not almighty.
Technological determinism has been the driving force for a few millenia rather than the human experience. Genetic selection using IVF under the guise of goodness is, at its core, no different than prior iterations of selecting a preferred human. The difference is the technology and the framing and its use. Many will say this "will only be used responsibly". That's the biggest red flag of TD because it's a claim that can't be guaranteed. Tesla "autopilot", AI, and plastic surgery are just a few examples.
"Eventually, having a normal birth becomes "immoral" because the quality of life for a randomly born baby is that much lower than for a genetically selected baby"
Given how expensive and labor intensive it is compared to just having sex, it does not seem possible for IVF to replace sex as the main method of reproduction in the near or even medium term future.
But granting the premise, assuming that IVF and polygenic selection become affordable and/or subsidized, sure that is how society works. It is immoral nowadays to deprive a child an education, or drink while pregnant, or deny a child medical care. It wasn't in the past, but now standards have changed.
The intent of my comment is to provide a longitudinal perspective that Gattaca provides a lens into. Yes IVF is pricey, but technology still gets adopted and cheaper over time. There is a huge volume of annual fertility treatment already. The situation is far larger and less isolated than a pair of parents who decide to not have a kid with schizophrenia. People are often vapid, shallow, and follow trends. e.g. Plastic surgery was meant to reconstruct people and now it deconstructs them too, we don't want this technology to follow a similar path.
Some data
ART Rates are increasing
[2000: ~100k ART -> 25k live births](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5209a1.htm)
[2021: ~400k ART -> 90k live births](https://nccd.cdc.gov/drh_art/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=DRH_ART.ClinicInfo&rdRequestForward=True&ClinicId=9999&ShowNational=1)
From: https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html
ART Prices have a lower floor
[1999: ~10k for IVF, adjusts to ~18k present day](http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/women/9905/19/financing.infertility/index.html)
[Present: ~10-20k](https://www.cnyfertility.com/ivf-cost/)
Note 1: I am not in the ART world and don't know if these pricing are an apt comparison. If I'm wrong, I get the feeling that it has gotten cheaper than I'm confident to claim.
Note 2: Sometimes prices don't change, but costs do. Subsidies, insurance, and payment plans can all increase affordability and prevalence of a system
Yeah, we could wind up living in a dystopia where people with heart defects aren't allowed to become astronauts!
Wait...
Strawman's argument. Do better
It's too much of a stretch to call it a strawman when it's what actually happens in the movie. It's the main conflict of the main plot! It's what the creators picked to focus on, however ridiculous that choice may've been! It's hardly anyone else's fault that you picked it as your argument despite it working against your position (and despite being Evidence From Fiction).
You were wrong, and you were curtly dismissive about it. Do better.
Look, OP used the premise of the movie in comparison to present day society (with a cheeky presentation as well) which distracts from the intention and story that Gattaca intends to communicate. It responds without actually responding to the argument that is being presented.
OP may fall into the class of people who didn't really get Gattaca or thought it was more utopian than dystopian, everything is open to interpretation and that's fine. I am here to discuss. OP did not expand the discussion.
And you did not expand the discussion either. And then you ended your point saying "You were wrong". Oy vey. Do better?
My high school biology teacher showed Gattaca to my class in the late 2000s. It's a perfect example of a movie that demonstrates the exact opposite of what the filmmakers were going for.
My husband and I just had some embryos frozen. The fact that this level of genetic screening exists at all just blows me away. Never did my 14-year-old self expect that the field would progress so fast that *I* would be using it, only ~15 years later.
While we were going through this months-long process, I sometimes doubted myself: "Should we really do this? It's a lot of money. This could pay for a lot of daycare..."
And then I'd just remember the IVF scene from Gattaca, and I'd be like, "Yes. Yes, we're doing this."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP1cCjBkWZU&ab_channel=PCW
> Remember, this child is still *you*. Simply, the *best* of you.
(Thankfully, my insurance covered it, so it only cost ~3.5 months of daycare out of pocket.)
I agree, most people that I watched Gattaca with didn't grasp the concept of "being human is no longer valued" that the movie themes on and how society is constantly defining who is "abled" and "valued" in society. When we discussed, they saw it as a story of personal triumph, of overcoming, of relentless determination of the protagonist against all odds, in a future that had evolved so well that it didn't need that. They didn't see the flipside of the coin, like the "perfect" astronaut who is replaced secretly after their leg injury makes them literally invalid in society. They rely on the protagonist to fill in their shoes so that their name and career can live on, so that they can have a place in society. The reality is that a society that picks who enters it, never truly accepts anyone. Sad
Congrats on your IVF treatment! It sounds like it went well?
I know right now IVF is still expensive and restricted to what are typically highly intentional, loving couples with resources available to them. As technology becomes cheaper and more widely accessible the ideal use cases tend to become unideal use cases, and this is where my primary concern lies. The longitudinal potential of this to create a society that accepts no one at baseline... non-trivial to me. Human perfectionism is more of a curse than a blessing, in my personal opinion.
When we say "life begins at conception", doesn't that mean the actual person does not exist until the sperm enters the egg? If we endow an unfertilized egg with personhood it seems we are complicating matters quite a bit.
There’s a whole philosophical literature on the “non-identity problem”. Some of it is stupid, some of it is great, but if one is interested in seeing what people have already said about this, to see if some of their ideas seem like meaningful insights: https://philpapers.org/s/non-identity%20problem
I can try to steelman the anti-screening (for whatever) argument like this: first, the pro-screening side can hypothetically respond with "tough luck, go be born to someone else", to which the anti-screening side says that, aha, but if everyone in the society does the screening, there's no parents left to be born to.
It's one thing to be one of the millions of eggs and trillions of sperms who didn't win the lottery. All your examples replace a would-be winner with another more or less random candidate, then pump the intuition that the former winner was chosen randomly anyway, and with astronomically low odds, so they don't get to complain as if they were robbed of their predestined birthright.
It's another thing when the lottery is rigged to give entire categories of embryos essentially zero chance to be born. In this case, better luck next time doesn't work, luck won't help, and that feels kind of unfair.
I personally don't approve of this way of thinking because I don't think that nonexistent humans have rights, but I suspect that most opponents are reaching for something like this intuition and you have to state and address it.
There's also people like Kevin Bird who say that saying that some traits are undesirable in embryos implies that they are undesirable in existing humans, so even if we double dog swear that we are not forcefully euthanizing existing humans, their feelings are still hurt and protecting them is worth creating lots and lots of real suffering. I disagree with that in strongest possible terms.
This has nothing to do with the post, but I like your username.
I personally have never understood how *so many* rationalists are strongly anti-eugenics.
Eugenics is one of the strongest "net positives" available to us, to the extent that literally *everybody* practices it strenuously, to basically the level of tech available today.
If Greg Clark's The Son Also Rises taught us anything, it's that assortative mating among elites is one of the strongest possibly optimized things that people do. For those effects to be true, assortative mating has to be one of the most important and most optimized choices people make - and indeed, if you look at the world, elite people are *extremely* selective about who they have children with.
To a first approximation, Rationalists are elites, by pay and by IQ, and by occupations. And everyone in our circles optimizes hard on the quality of their mates - what is this, but eugenics?
I don't understand why when you suddenly use some science to go a bit farther, it's suddenly verboten to most people here. You already spent *decades* trying to optimize this to the n-th degree!
The only objection that I've heard that isn't ad hominem (Nazi's did it isn't a real objection, particularly when literally everyone everywhere for all time strenuously optimizes mate quality), is that there can be unintended effects due to the complexity, or that only rich people will do it and this will lead to greater societal stratification and literal castes.
First, these are contradictory - if only rich people are doing it, the sample and the people affected is low enough that we can't really mess things up with unintended consequences.
Second, the rich ALREADY socially stratify, and are basically a caste! That's what The Son Also Rises is *about!*. It's been true for thousands of years!
And finally, there's literally no path for "regular" people to get to a place where they can polygenically select away genetic defects and select into any benefits UNLESS you go through early adopters, ie the rich.
Going to a consequentialist perspective, economic growth is the strongest lever and driver for eliminating poverty worldwide, and we will eventually be able to select on those things that will enable the elimination of poverty worldwide, ie IQ and conscientiousness.
The fact that somewhere along the way people will also be able to make their kids blonde and tall and healthy and strong and attractive as well (horrors! Aryan master race stuff!) is totally a personal choice for those parents, and is a GOOD thing.
From whatever perspective you come from, be it the individual parents' rights and choices, or from society's, or from the perspective of eliminating poverty and building a better future for the human race, polygenic selection is going to be one of the biggest levers we have to allow more choice, better societies, and less poverty. Why would we discard this tool, just because Nazi's did it in a really poor and biased way in the past?
> I personally have never understood how so many rationalists are strongly anti-eugenics.
Is this one of those "determinative nominativism" cases for which you picked your handle? :-)
Hahaha! Good show. But yes, one among a couple of topics that I disagree with the dominant hive mind on that merit the nominative moniker.
I always find it an odd experience being the iconoclast or outside thinker within our circles, because in normie circles we're usually iconoclasts for being Rationalists!
Oh, I thought the main post was a bit where you reiterated bog standard lesswrong rationalist positions, and the humor was that acx commentators were, in fact, not rationalists.
Why do I believe this? Consider that Scott comes out as pro-screening in this case, said that calling genetic engineering eugenics is an example of the worst argument in the world/non-central fallacy (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world)
Also gwern did a fairly detailed cost benefit calculation on gamete selection, including testing it on variations of selection (see: https://gwern.net/embryo-selection)
So this originating comment really seemed like someone entering a Taylor Swift concert and claiming that no one in sight heard any of her songs.
Oh, I definitely don't see it as a standard rationalist position overall or even in this comment thread. Has there been a survey indicating that it's a rough consensus? Was it a question on the SSC survey?
Certainly, I think some Rationalists, including relatively prominent ones like Scott and Gwern, are pro gengineering and embryo selection, and pro making conscious decisions to try to foster desired traits in the next generation (which I see as basically the definition of eugenics). Ives Parr commenting here has a pretty nice substack entirely devoted to the idea!
But isn't most of this 400 strong comment thread the proof that a substantial fraction, maybe even a majority, think that gengineering and embryo selection might be morally wrong, and is certainly questionable if not outright wrong? If I paraphrased what I see as the rat-sphere consensus on those two things, I'd say it's something like "there's a high potential for second-order problems and unknown unknowns, and we should move slowly and enact stringent regulation when this becomes possible."
When, for example, there's no regulations on who can have children with whom, or parenting styles or techniques, or anything like that, because in theory we feel it's a matter of individual choice and liberty. And given it's a slowly advancing technology that will only be available to a tiny subset of rich early adopters at first and for a decent while, moving slowly and having unanticipated side effects capped in impact is going to happen regardless. And yet all these people want to jump ahead and regulate what those rich early adopters can do!
I would also think given the (more consensus and agreed upon, IMO) AI risk attitudes in the rat-sphere, we'd want to move on this as *quickly* as possible, because raising the baseline for human capability and performance is probably one of the best things you can do when working on an extremely difficult problem that can affect our entire species and future light cone negatively.
I find it funny, and wanted to point out the mismatch, between people (including rationalists) doing basically everything they can to optimize mate quality, parenting, education, status, and whatever benefits-to-offspring they can enable to the n-th degree, which is explicitly eugenic and which everyone has been effortfully doing for a quarter million years, but then wanting to slow down and start regulating (other people, not themselves) when technology shows the first hint of making some additional baby-steps of progress on that front.
There's a bit of a crabs-in-a-bucket dynamic I'm seeing - you don't think the rich, educated, early adopters are going to be as thoughtful and effortful as, oh, you and basically every elite in history, when they're setting out to optimize their progeny? They need regulation specifying what they can and can't do? Apparently so.
Not a rationalist, but we've discussed eugenics on here before and I dived into pre-Nazi eugenicist promotion (so hoping to avoid the 'just because the Nazis did it, that tainted eugenics, that's unfair way to consider the topic and besides the Nazis didn't do proper eugenics' reaction).
Pretty much all the big names in eugenics were gung-ho for "family members, especially parents, decide who you marry; you marry based on best breeding outcome; ideal society grades everyone on a range of areas and you get to marry and reproduce based on your total score for best eugenic outcome; what do we do with the unfit, well that ranges from 'humane sterilisation' to 'do away with them but we're vague on this because bleeding-hearts would be outraged'".
It wasn't any happy "it's totally the decision of the persons involved as to how many and what kind of kids they have" ideal for the eugenicists, who were anticipating having local Eugenics Societies keeping records on *everyone* and making sure the 'unfit' didn't breed. Love? Sex? Pshaw, foolish notions, we'll rely on women being the sexual gatekeepers and make sure mothers influence their daughters not to even give the time of day to the low-scoring young man.
I think eugenics as a concept has always had two sides - positive eugenics, in terms of optimizing the quality of mates, and negative eugenics, in terms of preventing undesirables from breeding.
Any arguments for gengineering or embryo selection is definitionally only concerned with positive eugenics, and the individual choice and liberty of the parents making the choices.
Negative eugenics has basically always been a non-starter for liberal democracies, particularly since the Nazi's made it their own and forever tainted it. But even if Nazi's had never existed, most liberal democracies aren't going to vote that 50%+ of the voting populace can't reproduce, or vote for parenting licences or criteria, anyways, for pretty obvious reasons.
This leaves positive eugenics, which is now, and basically always has been, in full force. I'd even argue that the selection pressures and effects have been increasing with time, and with fewer and fewer unintended children born each year. My biggest source of confoundment is how rigorously people try to optimize positive eugenics without calling it that - mate quality, education, status, peer groups, any other advantages we can give to our kids - but then how strenuously the average person seems to be against any technologically-mediated baby steps along the same path.
>Pshaw, foolish notions, we'll rely on women being the sexual gatekeepers and make sure mothers influence their daughters not to even give the time of day to the low-scoring young man.
I mean, hasn't this basically happened, but at the individual level? Isn't this the cri de coer of so many men on dating apps, that it's impossible for a low-scoring man to get past the sexual gatekeeping?
Our big mistake from a eugenics perspective is probably optimizing *too hard.* The bottomless seas of dating apps deceive people into thinking they can achieve a higher quality of long term match than they really can, and combined with longer educational and career-launching periods, basically trap people into not making mate and child-having decisions until it's too late, thus our impaired elite fertility across the Western world.
Gengineering and embryo selection will almost certainly further impair elite fertility at first - just imagine, now you not only have to spend decades trying to find the appropriate-gender ubermensch worth having a kid with, but THEN you can only have a kid when you're willing to drop $500k a pop (or whatever), because otherwise they won't be competitive with the "6' 6" olympic-medaling von Neumann adonis" minimum standard that Harvard requires now! And what's the *point* of even having kids if they're not globe-straddling colossi in every field of endeavor??
"Any arguments for gengineering or embryo selection is definitionally only concerned with positive eugenics, and the individual choice and liberty of the parents making the choices."
It starts out like that, but always veers towards "and while we're at it, what about all these undesirables having hordes of brats? that's terrible for society! all that misery, poverty and crime continuing on, generation after generation!"
Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" showed the superior (positive eugenics results) people being tired of trying to hold society together and provide for all the millions of morons (the negative eugenics results), so they needed a solution. And they got one, from a cryogenically frozen 20th century man they thawed out. And that result was to kill off all the morons. The superiors didn't *like* it, but they went along with it, because well, what other choice was there? Not enough smart people, too many dumb people.
Positive eugenics, even at its most benign, does include negative eugenics: we choose to implant this embryo instead of that embryo, because that embryo has negative traits (e.g. genes for disease). Then it becomes that embryo lacks desired traits (will not be as smart, tall, blond(e), you pick which). And probably some sort of regulations around "even if IVF and polygenic screening is available for all, if you are one of the underclass we are not going to help you reproduce. We may not ban you, but we won't make it easier and cheaper for you to have those kids with the low IQ and tendency to be shiftless wastrels".
Nobody is going to think of themselves as a Nazi for supporting negative eugenics, because it's not like we're rounding the deplorables up into concentration camps, is it? We just don't want them having kids and carrying forward that criminal dumb lineage into the future where our smart, positive eugenics screened kids, will be living. Just a couple or three generations, and silently and without fuss the undesirables will fade out of existence.
Mostly agreed. Two quibbles:
One non-ad-hominem concern beyond those that you've cited is that there are a few parameters, most notably height, which can spark an arms race that benefits no one. This has been cited by several commenters in the overall discussion.
>Eugenics is one of the strongest "net positives" available to us
I'm skeptical, mostly due to speed. From zygote to Ph.D. is around a quarter century. My best guess is that even if we had perfect embryo selection for exactly the right criteria applied right now to the next generation of kids, by the time they got through their education I expect AIs will probably be well beyond the human range (though, of course, this may fail).
This comment section is basically a handful of contrarians arguing with everyone else. I've had an overwhelmingly pro-genetic screening experience in this comment section. I would estimate the number of anti-embryo-selection commenters here at less than ten individuals.
Scott wrote this post mostly to address the "bioethicists over the hill" who want to ban polygenic screening. It's not really directed at Rationalists, or even a majority of this readership. We're pretty much all on the same page, here.
you wrote "somewhere along the way people will also be able to make their kids blonde and tall and healthy and strong and attractive as well (horrors! Aryan master race stuff!) is totally a personal choice for those parents, and is a GOOD thing."
- Exactly! There is really *nothing wrong* with being pretty, smart and strong!
It even rhymes!
While I have the same moral intuitions as you on the replace vs. cure question, I don't think any of these examples address the objections people brought up in your last post. Fetal alcohol syndrome and child abuse are different from schizophrenia in ways that make your side of the argument a lot easier.
First, they aren't genetic. That lets you sidestep any argument that embryo selection = eugenics, or will inevitably lead to genetics. Second, they don't serve any valuable social function, not even an evo-psych handwave in the direction of one. That gets you around the Chesterton's fence-style objections to deleting parts of the human genome.
I would suggest redoing your situation 3 experiment with, say, autism as the condition to be avoided. If a world without autism gives you a different gut reaction than a world without child abuse, that would get you a little closer to understanding the other side of this argument.
Decisions are not made in an abstract, timeless way. Every decision is made at a specific point in time, based on the information that is available at that point.
In our particular scenario, the mother-to-be does not have the choice between being pregnant with a child conceived in the past when she was drinking, and one conceived in the future when she has stopped---not unless she's already pregnant and is considering abortion! Her choice is to get pregnant in the future while drinking, and to get pregnant in the future while not drinking. And the characteristics of either fertilized ovum are unknown; whatever she might assume about one she can just as well assume about the other.
Open question: do you think increasing human intelligence (either at the mean or on the margin), through IVF for instance, increases the risk of human catastrophe (I'm thinking from AI) or decreases it, on net?
This made me think of this: https://xkcd.com/2071/
Whom.
The objection is that gene-related issues are sensitive and you are supposed to be vague when talking about them. If you are clear and straightforward about it you violate the shroud of indeterminance to which they become attached. It forces their mind to come to conclusions they may not appreciate (which they project unto the breaker of the shroud) It could be considered psychic violence
I think the major objection to PGT-P is that it isn't ready for prime-time yet. We don't know the genes that cause schizophrenia and like most complex diseases, it's likely to be many genes. The data that current associations are based on are also flawed. Also, it's unlikely that there would be much variation in risk in a small cohort of embryos to be clinically significant (my understanding is that you need hundreds before you start to see huge differences). And you may be inadvertently selecting against some beneficial trait. Having said that, if the patient has been adequately counseled and is already doing IVF for infertility reasons and wants to do PGT-P, I think they should be able to. But at this point, I personally would not recommend someone do IVF just to do PGT-P.
The problem people seem to be gesturing at is a slightly more difficult one than you seem to acknowledge, although I generally agree that these “isolated demands for rigor” are a sign of bad faith.
The problem is the question of the rights of future people, which plagues many ethical theories, but most notoriously utilitatianism in the “repugnant conclusion” thought experiment.
It seems wrong to cause harm to occur to future people, and good to cause good things to occur to future generations. Doing good/preventing harm to currently living people is straightforward, and can in most circumstances be done consensually, since the people are alive to be consulted.
But we can’t ask future generations for permission to make modifications to their lives that we currently find desireable. Furthermore, there are questions of individualism that are not easy to answer. Can we do harm to specific future people to help the average future person? How do we deal with future people as individuals?
I think many people intuitively respond to this problem complex by leaning into passivity. It’s acceptable to passively jostle sperm because the outcome is random and unavoidable. It’s unacceptable to actively select for certain traits (say, controversially, lighter skin color) because this cannot be done without asking permission, which is unavoidable. It’s a sort of ethical default preference, or maybe a version of the naturalistic fallacy.
That said, no person or ethical theorist gets out of the problem of future people looking particularly good, so I find it hard to criticize these sorts of intuitions too much. I simply don’t share them.
When you say "the anti-abortionist doesn’t have much of a case here" (you start 'Even if', but I think the logic of your paragraph is that you don't think they have much of a case) I think you mean "they don't have much of a case outside of their general case against IVF"? You seem to me to have shown that they do have a case in total.
I find utilitarianism unsatisfactory on a number of different grounds, both epistemic and ethical. But the one that's most relevant here is that it supposes we can define a utility function for an individual human being; that is, that given any two options to choose between, we can assign each a utility score, and then the better choice for that human being is the one that attains the higher utility score---in the classic wording, the one that provides the "greatest happiness." And I simply don't believe that human brains work that way. I think that there are domains within which different values are compared regularly with each other, and thus are commensurable, and we can say that one is favored over the other; but I think there are also cases where we have to choose between values that fall into different domains, in which we do not have an established ranking, and do not even have a procedure for arriving at such a ranking. That is, I think human beings do not have global utility functions. And the choice between values that fall into different domains is inherently hard, and may be painful, as in the classic conundrum of "should I betray my country or betray my friend?" The kind of purely calculational ethics that utilitarianism offers excludes the possibility of tragedy.
And I think that, in the first place, one of the merits of virtue ethics is that the virtues it recommends may stand us in good stead in the face of tragedy, enabling us to make good choices when nothing approximating utilitarian calculation is any help. And in the second place, if we are to have any method for making choices that is generally applicable of helpful in such difficulties, that method most closely approximates the creation of works of art. And while there certainly can be a rational and even calculating aspect to art, the kind of synthesis that it calls for takes place on a different level than simple calculation; and the same may apply to the kind of synthesis that we perform when we try to lead an ethical life.
Before discussing the Alabama IVF decision, they should read the opinions (all 131+ pages!)
Here's a link: https://publicportal-api.alappeals.gov/courts/68f021c4-6a44-4735-9a76-5360b2e8af13/cms/case/343D203A-B13D-463A-8176-C46E3AE4F695/docketentrydocuments/E3D95592-3CBE-4384-AFA6-063D4595AA1D
My perspective is as a lawyer, law professor, and grandparent of a lovely girl born as the result of implantation of a donated embryo. I'm sure that colors my understanding - in particular, I appreciate something that is not mentioned in any of the news coverage I've seen, which is the generosity of couples donating embryos to infertile couples, so that the embryos and the families of those couples can get the benefit of having children.
It should surprise no one that the media's presentation of the decision is inaccurate. The majority held that fertilized embryos are covered by a state statute making compensable injuries to children by including in the definition of a child a fertilized embryo. (The various judges, and the dissent in particular, have a lot to say about whether that is a reasonable interpretation of a statute passed in the 19th century long before IVF was possible. That's a hotly contested question and the majority and dissent are both worth reading on the issue.)
The facts of the case are that a clinic - in what appears to be at the least a negligent way -- allowed someone to wander into its storage area and destroy some embryos by removing them from the cold storage and drop them on the floor. Certainly this clinic should be liable to the parents. The court had to decide whether it would be liable for damaging the parents' property, violating its contractual obligations to the parents, or in tort for injury to a child. It went with the latter. There are good arguments (made by the various opinions) for and against the majority's decision, but the majority's interpretation of the statute isn't the result of backwoods judges doing crazy stuff. It's a plausible interpretation of the statute. (There is an odd concurrence by the Chief Justice that delves deeply into theology in search of the meaning of "sanctity of life" - that one isn't (to my ears) really a legal argument but it also isn't the majority opinion and so isn't what drove the result.)
Clinics are upset (tort damages are more than property or contract damages would be). They are hoping to get the AL (and other states') legislature to amend the law to give them protection from such suits. One good way to launch that campaign is to try to frame the decision as anti-IVF and portray themselves as the good guys helping infertile couples. This clinic, however, was not the good guy - it was (at a minimum) pretty careless in protecting the embryos from people wandering around its facility. (Door locks are not high tech! Freezer locks aren't either!)
Reasonable people can differ about whether the court got the statutory interpretation question right (and the members of the court do). But this isn't a decision that will end IVF treatments in AL by imposing an intolerable burden on clinics - and it doesn't seem reasonable to me for the clinics to have stopped IVF treatments in response to it, so long as they were behaving non-negligently in their creation, storage, and implantation of the embryos.
I'm going to be a cynic here, and say that the opposition to the court decision and the painting of the court as a bunch of dumb Alabama hick rednecks has to do with abortion.
After all, if you classify these embryos as children and that they have rights which can be injured and you can be held liable for harm done to them - that's pretty bad for the pro-choice rationale that embryos are only clumps of cells, potential but not actual humans, have no rights, and are the property of the mother whose choice alone makes them either a baby or not, and whose rights outweigh those.
You're not supposed to kill children, but if embryos aren't children, then abortion is okay. If embryos are held to be legally children, then you're ceding all this ground to the ignorant pro-lifers and that means untold thousands of deaths by forced pregnancy of raped ten year olds who die in childbirth (that's a real argument I saw online about 'if Trump wins the election', by the way).
I think that "social policy decisions" are a different case from what's outlined in the trolley problem. In the specific case of five versus one, you can see the five people, you can see the one person, and you are deciding that that specific one person must die to spare the lives of the others. In a social policy decision, you inherently cannot identify the people who will be made worse off, or how much worse off they will be made; you are deciding between probabilities of distributing damage in various ways through a large population, with the consequences for any one person not fully knowable in advance, and the consequences for every one person in the population impossible to know in advance. I don't see that intuitions that are developed in the one situation can meaningfully generalize to the other.
Another thought is related to trolley problem reasoning. How interchangeable are lives. How much work can yiu put into casting the role of "this couple's first child" before its a different person?
The only slightly reasonable objection I have heard for not selectively aborting down syndrome-fetuses is the following: If we like diversity, someone have to pay the cost for making the world more divers, ie having kids with downs syndrome even though it is probably more work than having kids without such syndrome. (This is btw also predicated on the sort of empirically testable hypothesis that people with downs doesnt suffer a lot more than healthy people. I have heard that this is true and that they even report higher happiness in surveys. At least i societies and times that doesnt hide and/or torture them.)
Even if I grant this argument it comes out more like a coordination-problem: How do we make people committ to keeping downs-fetuses and having downs-kids? It does not make ME want to parent a child with downs syndrome myself. (I have three healthy kids. Maybe one with downs is better than zero.)
Then again, the norm that we shouldnt selectively abort children can be seen as exactly the coordination-function we would need to get more diversity, to the cost of the parents who get the "diverse" kids.
I think talking about this as though it's a given is incorrect. As Scott mentioned - it's about low risk and high risk. So it's not a matter of choosing schizophrenia or not choosing it. It's a matter of how much you want.
"Would you tell an embryo-selected person to their face that you would rather they not exist?"
This analogy lacks important symmetry, and I suspect was made as a weak additional argument to make it seem like overwhelming force in favor of the position. Cf. Proving Too much SSC, 2013.
A general principle is that the method used to make something is different from what is made. I can object to brownies from an Easy-bake-Oven. But that objection is categorically different from objecting to 12 inch pecan brownies. Even though the method constrains what can be made - eg. Easy bake ovens are small - that is not the same as objecting to what is made.
It seems like the "rational" way to discuss this topic is something like "sure, religious nuts (wrongly) think life begins at conception, so they hate the implied murders, and sure, dumb emotional people feel icky about eliminating difficult conditions like schizophrenia due to misplaced sympathy for existing schizophrenics. But once you get past these silly objections, this is obviously good."
But I think a majority of people have similar intuition (something like: yikes) when they learn about this procedure, and I think that intuition is due to some real, albeit hard to pin down or summarize, potential problems. In fact, the wide range of negative possibilities is potentially one of the greatest arguments against this type of screening.
For example, it's really easy for me to think of "harmless" but ethically messy examples. Should it be legal to screen based on skin tone? Should it be legal to screen out harmful skin conditions which are statistically associated with specific skin tone ranges? How many "individual couples just choosing their preference" would we allow to screen out e.g. dark skin before it's comparable to a type of ethnic cleansing? This isn't hypothetical; there are absolutely diseases which occur mainly or only among certain ethnicities. Eliminating such diseases may reduce the prevalence of a bunch of related ethnic traits. If a multiethnic couple share a preference for e.g. the Irish husband's physical looks over the Asian wife's physical looks, does society have an obligation to prevent such a decision?
Should it be legal to screen based on probable political views? How about religiosity, or likely preference for a specific religion? Are we comfortable if eliminating disease also unexpectedly eliminates red hair, or wide noses, or freckles? Or what about the Belyaev fox experiment? Selecting foxes for personality traits surprisingly changed the physical makeup of the resulting population. It's not hard to imagine the reverse happening to humans, whereby we reduce genetic variance to eliminate disease and accidentally reduce positive personality traits.
It's also easy to picture not-far-away dystopias resulting from the widespread use of such screening. None of these seem easy to prevent except by luck:
- An entire generation shares a preference for e.g. tallness, and then a pandemic which kills in proportion to height is extra deadly.
- A government notices a connection between e.g. pliability and some disease, then hides the connection and enforces elimination of the disease "for the greater good".
- A perverted doctor/scientist/intern (whoever is in charge of this selection procedure) gives hundreds of families the sickest possible children, and no one notices for years.
- A temporary cultural fad is pro-[insert obviously negative trait or disease], and a generation of children struggles to survive their shared condition.
- A strange upper limit on IQ is reached whereupon social norms warp in an unexpected and dangerous way.
- New types of negative biases emerge toward people born "unchosen".
- Humanity almost entirely screens out a trait. Too late, we realize how much we depend on it.