My experience in Sydney, Australia showed me that genetics are only one factor in the over-riding phenonmenon of reversion to the mean. I lived there twenty two years from 1995, before Sydney was discovered by the rest of the world because of the 2000 Olympics.
At the time it was as about as close to paradise as can be imagined on earth. My two sons were 4 and 2 when we arrived, and my daughter was born in Sydney. They are now in the late 20s through mid-30s.
I watched their peers grow up with the best possible inputs on earth: talented, hard working and loving parents, perfect weather, abundant healthy food, athletic activity, excellent schools of the caliber of American private schools from the 1950s (which is what Australia felt like in the 1990s), yearly or semi-annual overseas vacations, an educated population. I was expecting to see these children grow up into a super-elite.
A minority have done well. Most of them wiped out in one way or another, or at best dramatically under-performed given their upbringing, opportunities and genetic and social advantages. As a shorthand model for what happened to this entire generation of privileged Australians, think of the Kennedy family since Joseph P. Sure his descendents include deputy governor of Maryland (or whatever) and the incumbent HHS Secretary, but stepping back and looking at the founder, reversion to the mean is obvious.
There's also something about growing up in a privileged environment, which I saw in Sydney without being able to identify the precise factors, which blights the soul and severely limits the horizons of personal achievement. Thiel's Gay Space Fascism will bear the poisoned fruit of depressed and / or depraved elite spawn who won't be fit for responsible positions and for emotional and psychological reasons won't even remotely represent the human talent required to produce a viable new global elite by the late mid-to-late 21st century. That's what my decades in Sydney watching the upbringing of the current generation of young adult tells me. The adults most resistant to whatever it is that blights human beings were from groups who have traditional values: Jews, Indians and Asians--and so powerful is the liberal regime ideology that even many of them, in their late 20s and mid-30s, are withering and displaying abberant behaviour.
My money is on the children of normal families who grow up with a loving father and mother, religious faith and other traditional values, and a commitment to working hard and making the world a better place. However modest their circumstances, it is they who are being prepared for success in life, and the best of them will inherit the world.
I think was really displeases me about the whole gene editing IVF scene is the implicit contempt for sexual intercourse. All this scientific witchcraft is to create children without making love.
Another potential thing that might happen with gene editing and embryo selection is that it might not work. As in, there would be unforeseen negative consequences that would happen later. Selecting for IQ might sound nice, until you breed a psychopath who has zero empathy whatsoever. Going all in on intellectual intelligence might be at the expense of emotional intelligence. You're breeding for superbabies, and instead you get autistic retards who struggle socially. There also could be issues with the gene editing process itself. In the attempts to add new genes to the zygote, you might accidentally delete beneficial genes you didn't know existed. This could result in more allergies or other maladies that we can't even dream of now. I would also expect these upper middle class striver types to get hysterical about it - as in hysterically pro gene editing and they refuse to listen to any criticism whatsoever. I would not be surprising if it would play out exactly the same way with the covid vaccine. Its virtues are extolled; any criticism is either dismiss or censored. The strivers thought they were getting a cure for covid, but instead they got blood clots. This could easily happen with gene editing, where of course you want your kids to be smarter, but the strivers then overlook some comically stupid downsides because they live in an echo chamber. The gene edit babies might not just have social problems, they might even have more medical problems than naturals.
I would not be surprised if the race realists and genetic scientists who tout gene editing, embryo selection, IVF, etc. are also the same right-wingers who got vaccinated. They may have opposed the mandates based on some theory of freedom of choice, or they may have even supported the vaccine mandates; but my intuition is telling me that they are pretty much all vaccinated. And if there are a few that didn't, they probably did so because they looked at too much data and decided that the vaccine was ineffective, but would still dismiss blood clots and that stuff and cooky conspiracy theory nonsense.
I think regardless of how and/or if the tech ends up actually 'working' in the longterm it is highly, highly likely you're going to have several 'bad batches' of gene edited/screened individuals who turn out to have horrifying side effects later in life due to the activities and practices of companies like Orchid. However, the Gay Space Fascist response is simply some version of 'can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs' etc.
I'm sorry but that's complete cope. It's true that high IQ people are more likely to have allergies but would you prefer to have 100 IQ without allergies or 145 with allergies? And embryo selection doesn't alter genes, it chooses embryos for higher scores. Now gains are neglible but with time they will grow and compound over generations
I never said that high IQ people have more allergies. I said that allergies might be a negative consequence of gene editing, just like they are with vaccines. Yes, embryo selection is technically not gene editing, but you still have to grapple with the morality of literally killing children.
I know, I said that. Study on Mensa members suggests that. I'm against gene editing and embryo selection for traits but your argument is cope. People would choose to have allergy and high IQ which is part of problem. It will cause extremely lowering of psychological and physical diversity in few generations
I would say that it's the Trait. It predicts income and GDP per Capita. So it's most likely to cause chain reaction through competition both in society and internationally
Eugenics is fine; we've been doing it for awhile. Many abortions are eugenics, preventing people with mental illness from donating sperm and eggs is eugenics. These are fine. Random chance isn't a god, you don't have to obey its whims when it decides some of the most important aspects about your kids.
There's obvious difference in consequences between preventing people with mental illnesses from donating sperm and eggs to genetically engineering whole society
Prevent sperm/egg donations from people with ADHD vs gene edit ADHD out of an embryo-- What is the obvious difference in consequences between these two?
There's quite obvious difference. People with ADHD still will have children and their genes will exist in gene pool. And besides that's straw man. Obviously article talks about editing for "Traits"(IQ, attractiveness, personality)
So with gene editing more people will have their genes in the pool than if they were prevented from donating sperm/eggs. So the form of eugenics we practice and accept now (preventing people with ADHD from donating sperm/eggs) is worse than gene editing?
And if it's ok to edit genes to make people less distractible, how is that different from editing genes to make them more or less of any other trait?
Genetic diversity doesn't drop that much and with it psychological diversity. Difference is obvious and glaring. Changing traits that make people more likely to climb social ladder will force other people to do the same. Those born naturally will be form of new subhuman.
> Perhaps the most important point: the entire aim of genetic screening is really the conferral of advantage.
This is quite a zero-sum worldview. There isn’t any intrinsic benefit or desirability to having children free of genetic risk factors for diseases etc? In other words, you would prefer they have a disease, just for fairness sake?
One can make a very compelling case for embryo screening when it comes to couples with histories of terrifying genetic disease. O.K. deal, how about we limit the procedure to only be accessible to people wishing to use it for this reason? Seems like a rational compromise to me yet if you suggest it to these people they will have a meltdown. Why? 1) It's far less profitable to only cater to a relatively small subset of the population and 2) this doesn't jive with the Thielverse's barely veiled desire to breed a class of supermen via genetic editing/screening
Why limit it to “terrifying” diseases? Isn’t it also worthwhile to reduce less exotic but still very harmful diseases such as diabetes, addiction, Alzheimer’s, etc?
Second type diabieties come mostly from unhealthy lifestyle. Most of your examples I agree with but addiction? Choosing psychological traits or even mental illness you get rid of psychological diversity in population. For example schizophrenia shares genes and psycholgi profile with creativity. People with family's history of schizophrenia are more creative
Article obviously is about selecting for "Traits" as their called in field. So IQ, attracriveness, personality. They are treasured because they give competitive advantage over other people
I think a society of healthy smart people would be better then a society of unhealthy dumb people.
The cost issue is a red herring. It’s really not particularly expensive and could be covered by insurance. We spend way more money trying to fix the problems of bad genetics than it would cost to fix the genetics.
There will be a transition period where some people are “first movers” on this new technology. Some will feel “left behind” because they weren’t first movers. Compassion and support are appropriate responses to this problem, not resentment and denial. Your attitude merely ensures that everyone dumb enough to listen to you ends up in the left behind bucket.
Gaza is a good example of what not using this technology will look like. Modern fertility favors the dumb, violent, and brown.
This is a moronic response (but not at all atypical for Gay Space Fascists!). Only a complete moron, or someone who has no experience with actual lived reality outside of a computer screen could unironically type the following: "We spend way more money trying to fix the problems of bad genetics than it would cost to fix the genetics." Society is not merely a set of amoral inputs and outputs (assuming your have the perceptive intelligence to even ascertain these things, which, let me tell you pal, you obviously don't!) More importantly you narcissistically assume that 'your side' wins in the end when the evidence doesn't necessarily support this, in fact, your team is just as likely to end up fertilizing a wheat field as it is to be ruling over the coming Silicon Reich. Rather, this is merely a story you tell yourself about yourself to give your life a sense of greater meaning and purpose that would otherwise be unwarranted. Think on your sins and repent!
I hope people don't listen to you because they will make their lives and the lives of those around them worse. I'm confident most people will recognize this.
It's sad that you've committed religious impulses to such a destructive and futile path. The task of finding a place for those that feel left behind is important, but if it gets wedded to destructive resentment and nihilism there will be less space for effective sympathy.
As you yourself have admitted, you are simply not intelligent enough to continue this conversation. You lack the ability to engage in reasoned dialogue in a fundamental way. Honestly, you probably shouldn’t be able to vote, no less publicly advocate for eugenics and genocide on a mass scale.
Remember the lady scientist who did something with dna, and they convicted her of fraud. I remain unconvinced that Thiel's a villainous Lex Luthor, he strikes me more as a Perfidia Beverly Hills
I don’t think embryo selection is as powerful as you’re making it out to be.
In the best case scenario, it just means that you can increase the odds that the child you give birth to is the smartest child you could have had. The ceiling on a child’s IQ is still dictated by their parents’ genetic potential and their environment.
At best, embryo selection for IQ could potentially prevent IQ regression to the mean over several generations for high-IQ families. That’s a far cry from creating a race of genetically-enhanced brainiac supermen.
It's 3-8 IQ points for generation as I remember. So 1 g 100 vs let's say 130 2nd g 100 vs 133-138 3rd g 100 vs 136-146 4th g 100 vs 139-154. And that's only with embryo selection for 10 embryos. We haven't touched genetic engineering
You're not wrong to worry about something that amounts to a caste system developing if this type of technology remains prohibitively expensive for some significant percent of people... But that if is doing some heavy lifting. And you're running the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater - I don't think developing tech that enables eliminating genetic diseases is controversial, nor should it be. And so far, that's all this technology really seems able to do.
In Europe for example embryo screening is only legal for medical reasons. Why not have same law in USA? Article isn't about embryo selection as technology. It's about using it for "Traits"(IQ, attractiveness,personality)
A part of being human is to understand the world, including our own species, in terms of its natural diversity. Efforts to interfere throughout time have ended up in some atrocious outcomes.
My experience in Sydney, Australia showed me that genetics are only one factor in the over-riding phenonmenon of reversion to the mean. I lived there twenty two years from 1995, before Sydney was discovered by the rest of the world because of the 2000 Olympics.
At the time it was as about as close to paradise as can be imagined on earth. My two sons were 4 and 2 when we arrived, and my daughter was born in Sydney. They are now in the late 20s through mid-30s.
I watched their peers grow up with the best possible inputs on earth: talented, hard working and loving parents, perfect weather, abundant healthy food, athletic activity, excellent schools of the caliber of American private schools from the 1950s (which is what Australia felt like in the 1990s), yearly or semi-annual overseas vacations, an educated population. I was expecting to see these children grow up into a super-elite.
A minority have done well. Most of them wiped out in one way or another, or at best dramatically under-performed given their upbringing, opportunities and genetic and social advantages. As a shorthand model for what happened to this entire generation of privileged Australians, think of the Kennedy family since Joseph P. Sure his descendents include deputy governor of Maryland (or whatever) and the incumbent HHS Secretary, but stepping back and looking at the founder, reversion to the mean is obvious.
There's also something about growing up in a privileged environment, which I saw in Sydney without being able to identify the precise factors, which blights the soul and severely limits the horizons of personal achievement. Thiel's Gay Space Fascism will bear the poisoned fruit of depressed and / or depraved elite spawn who won't be fit for responsible positions and for emotional and psychological reasons won't even remotely represent the human talent required to produce a viable new global elite by the late mid-to-late 21st century. That's what my decades in Sydney watching the upbringing of the current generation of young adult tells me. The adults most resistant to whatever it is that blights human beings were from groups who have traditional values: Jews, Indians and Asians--and so powerful is the liberal regime ideology that even many of them, in their late 20s and mid-30s, are withering and displaying abberant behaviour.
My money is on the children of normal families who grow up with a loving father and mother, religious faith and other traditional values, and a commitment to working hard and making the world a better place. However modest their circumstances, it is they who are being prepared for success in life, and the best of them will inherit the world.
I don't think you understand what 30-40 IQ gap means and with better technologies it could easily be 70-90
This type of technology will unleash Enochian horrors beyond comprehension.
as if synthetic IQ tests mean anything. I've always wondered how Mozart or Rembrandt would have scored on these modern IQ tests
They predict quite a lot
So modern fertility favors your mother's customers
I think was really displeases me about the whole gene editing IVF scene is the implicit contempt for sexual intercourse. All this scientific witchcraft is to create children without making love.
Another potential thing that might happen with gene editing and embryo selection is that it might not work. As in, there would be unforeseen negative consequences that would happen later. Selecting for IQ might sound nice, until you breed a psychopath who has zero empathy whatsoever. Going all in on intellectual intelligence might be at the expense of emotional intelligence. You're breeding for superbabies, and instead you get autistic retards who struggle socially. There also could be issues with the gene editing process itself. In the attempts to add new genes to the zygote, you might accidentally delete beneficial genes you didn't know existed. This could result in more allergies or other maladies that we can't even dream of now. I would also expect these upper middle class striver types to get hysterical about it - as in hysterically pro gene editing and they refuse to listen to any criticism whatsoever. I would not be surprising if it would play out exactly the same way with the covid vaccine. Its virtues are extolled; any criticism is either dismiss or censored. The strivers thought they were getting a cure for covid, but instead they got blood clots. This could easily happen with gene editing, where of course you want your kids to be smarter, but the strivers then overlook some comically stupid downsides because they live in an echo chamber. The gene edit babies might not just have social problems, they might even have more medical problems than naturals.
I would not be surprised if the race realists and genetic scientists who tout gene editing, embryo selection, IVF, etc. are also the same right-wingers who got vaccinated. They may have opposed the mandates based on some theory of freedom of choice, or they may have even supported the vaccine mandates; but my intuition is telling me that they are pretty much all vaccinated. And if there are a few that didn't, they probably did so because they looked at too much data and decided that the vaccine was ineffective, but would still dismiss blood clots and that stuff and cooky conspiracy theory nonsense.
I think regardless of how and/or if the tech ends up actually 'working' in the longterm it is highly, highly likely you're going to have several 'bad batches' of gene edited/screened individuals who turn out to have horrifying side effects later in life due to the activities and practices of companies like Orchid. However, the Gay Space Fascist response is simply some version of 'can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs' etc.
True. I still oppose it for moral reasons, out of principle; it would still be evil even if there were not side effects.
I'm sorry but that's complete cope. It's true that high IQ people are more likely to have allergies but would you prefer to have 100 IQ without allergies or 145 with allergies? And embryo selection doesn't alter genes, it chooses embryos for higher scores. Now gains are neglible but with time they will grow and compound over generations
I never said that high IQ people have more allergies. I said that allergies might be a negative consequence of gene editing, just like they are with vaccines. Yes, embryo selection is technically not gene editing, but you still have to grapple with the morality of literally killing children.
I know, I said that. Study on Mensa members suggests that. I'm against gene editing and embryo selection for traits but your argument is cope. People would choose to have allergy and high IQ which is part of problem. It will cause extremely lowering of psychological and physical diversity in few generations
Okay? IQ is simply an example of a trait.
I would say that it's the Trait. It predicts income and GDP per Capita. So it's most likely to cause chain reaction through competition both in society and internationally
amin, do they teach you where they developed IQ testing? It does not measure what you think it does.
Eugenics is fine; we've been doing it for awhile. Many abortions are eugenics, preventing people with mental illness from donating sperm and eggs is eugenics. These are fine. Random chance isn't a god, you don't have to obey its whims when it decides some of the most important aspects about your kids.
There's obvious difference in consequences between preventing people with mental illnesses from donating sperm and eggs to genetically engineering whole society
Prevent sperm/egg donations from people with ADHD vs gene edit ADHD out of an embryo-- What is the obvious difference in consequences between these two?
There's quite obvious difference. People with ADHD still will have children and their genes will exist in gene pool. And besides that's straw man. Obviously article talks about editing for "Traits"(IQ, attractiveness, personality)
So with gene editing more people will have their genes in the pool than if they were prevented from donating sperm/eggs. So the form of eugenics we practice and accept now (preventing people with ADHD from donating sperm/eggs) is worse than gene editing?
And if it's ok to edit genes to make people less distractible, how is that different from editing genes to make them more or less of any other trait?
Genetic diversity doesn't drop that much and with it psychological diversity. Difference is obvious and glaring. Changing traits that make people more likely to climb social ladder will force other people to do the same. Those born naturally will be form of new subhuman.
> Perhaps the most important point: the entire aim of genetic screening is really the conferral of advantage.
This is quite a zero-sum worldview. There isn’t any intrinsic benefit or desirability to having children free of genetic risk factors for diseases etc? In other words, you would prefer they have a disease, just for fairness sake?
One can make a very compelling case for embryo screening when it comes to couples with histories of terrifying genetic disease. O.K. deal, how about we limit the procedure to only be accessible to people wishing to use it for this reason? Seems like a rational compromise to me yet if you suggest it to these people they will have a meltdown. Why? 1) It's far less profitable to only cater to a relatively small subset of the population and 2) this doesn't jive with the Thielverse's barely veiled desire to breed a class of supermen via genetic editing/screening
Why limit it to “terrifying” diseases? Isn’t it also worthwhile to reduce less exotic but still very harmful diseases such as diabetes, addiction, Alzheimer’s, etc?
Second type diabieties come mostly from unhealthy lifestyle. Most of your examples I agree with but addiction? Choosing psychological traits or even mental illness you get rid of psychological diversity in population. For example schizophrenia shares genes and psycholgi profile with creativity. People with family's history of schizophrenia are more creative
Article obviously is about selecting for "Traits" as their called in field. So IQ, attracriveness, personality. They are treasured because they give competitive advantage over other people
I think a society of healthy smart people would be better then a society of unhealthy dumb people.
The cost issue is a red herring. It’s really not particularly expensive and could be covered by insurance. We spend way more money trying to fix the problems of bad genetics than it would cost to fix the genetics.
There will be a transition period where some people are “first movers” on this new technology. Some will feel “left behind” because they weren’t first movers. Compassion and support are appropriate responses to this problem, not resentment and denial. Your attitude merely ensures that everyone dumb enough to listen to you ends up in the left behind bucket.
Gaza is a good example of what not using this technology will look like. Modern fertility favors the dumb, violent, and brown.
This is a moronic response (but not at all atypical for Gay Space Fascists!). Only a complete moron, or someone who has no experience with actual lived reality outside of a computer screen could unironically type the following: "We spend way more money trying to fix the problems of bad genetics than it would cost to fix the genetics." Society is not merely a set of amoral inputs and outputs (assuming your have the perceptive intelligence to even ascertain these things, which, let me tell you pal, you obviously don't!) More importantly you narcissistically assume that 'your side' wins in the end when the evidence doesn't necessarily support this, in fact, your team is just as likely to end up fertilizing a wheat field as it is to be ruling over the coming Silicon Reich. Rather, this is merely a story you tell yourself about yourself to give your life a sense of greater meaning and purpose that would otherwise be unwarranted. Think on your sins and repent!
That's a lot of words with no content.
I hope people don't listen to you because they will make their lives and the lives of those around them worse. I'm confident most people will recognize this.
It's sad that you've committed religious impulses to such a destructive and futile path. The task of finding a place for those that feel left behind is important, but if it gets wedded to destructive resentment and nihilism there will be less space for effective sympathy.
As you yourself have admitted, you are simply not intelligent enough to continue this conversation. You lack the ability to engage in reasoned dialogue in a fundamental way. Honestly, you probably shouldn’t be able to vote, no less publicly advocate for eugenics and genocide on a mass scale.
Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling
Re Gattaca: it's an unabashedly Gnostic story. The genetic selection plot is just the vehicle for Gnostic ideas.
You think it's a trick?
Remember the lady scientist who did something with dna, and they convicted her of fraud. I remain unconvinced that Thiel's a villainous Lex Luthor, he strikes me more as a Perfidia Beverly Hills
I don’t think embryo selection is as powerful as you’re making it out to be.
In the best case scenario, it just means that you can increase the odds that the child you give birth to is the smartest child you could have had. The ceiling on a child’s IQ is still dictated by their parents’ genetic potential and their environment.
At best, embryo selection for IQ could potentially prevent IQ regression to the mean over several generations for high-IQ families. That’s a far cry from creating a race of genetically-enhanced brainiac supermen.
It's 3-8 IQ points for generation as I remember. So 1 g 100 vs let's say 130 2nd g 100 vs 133-138 3rd g 100 vs 136-146 4th g 100 vs 139-154. And that's only with embryo selection for 10 embryos. We haven't touched genetic engineering
My impression is that most of this is illegal in most of the developed world. Interesting as always to see the difference.
Yes, only 'mericans and third worlderds don't have laws against it
You're not wrong to worry about something that amounts to a caste system developing if this type of technology remains prohibitively expensive for some significant percent of people... But that if is doing some heavy lifting. And you're running the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater - I don't think developing tech that enables eliminating genetic diseases is controversial, nor should it be. And so far, that's all this technology really seems able to do.
In Europe for example embryo screening is only legal for medical reasons. Why not have same law in USA? Article isn't about embryo selection as technology. It's about using it for "Traits"(IQ, attractiveness,personality)
A part of being human is to understand the world, including our own species, in terms of its natural diversity. Efforts to interfere throughout time have ended up in some atrocious outcomes.