And of course no LessWrong post would be complete without the obligatory "I thought about this for a few minutes and there's clearly a better way":
> For such a dumb method, [GWAS] works remarkably well [...] The smarter way to do this is to use some kind of machine learning method like LASSO. This will give you a better predictor for the same amount of data. But for some reason I still don't really understand, academia almost exclusively uses GWAS.
Ah yes, the advanced "machine learning" method of using L1 regularized linear regression for variable selection, which was invented in the 1960's. I can't imagine why somebody would instead prefer to use statistical significance tests when working with binary variables in situations when you only have a handful of alternatives (i.e. embryos) to choose between.
I mean i'm being a little unfair here - they might mean using L1 regularization with logistic regression. But even so it's still dumb.
It's not dumb because it's obviously a bad idea - it isn't - it's dumb because they obviously don't know when it's a good idea or why, yet they feel confident in second guessing people with real expertise.
And also it's very silly to call LASSO a "machine learning" method, as if to imply that it's somehow a more modern and sophisticated idea than regular statistical significance tests.
I guess I mean like, as a contrast. Like it's dumb to say "you shouldn't use the t-test, you should use a machine learning method like LASSO instead". They're *both* machine learning, by that way of thinking
You mean Gwern? Yeah he reminds me of a chinese room; he produces prodigious output from prodigious input without any obvious signs of having accumulated meaning or understanding from his inputs.
Yeah, I didn't like the tone of my last reply but its weird when you look "so what does this guy do" and it turns out "he just retrains hip models on anime pictures." Which isn't a bad thing, it's a replication! But I would expect more from someone who in every other way presents as an authority.
He's really the platonic ideal of the rationalist aesthetic: he creates the illusion of expertise from voluminous output. Like, as far as I can tell, he doesn't actually know anything, he just spends a really huge amount of time regurgitating things he's seen elsewhere. He's like a really inaccurate copy-and-paste bot, or a low-quality implementation of ChatGPT.
Funny thing is that ever-more-impressive athletes wouldn't necessarily contribute significantly to society by any meaningful metric - competition is about relative performance, not absolute. And if these supposed utilitarian parents cared at all about their kids, they'd also have to acknowledge that many highly successful athletes suffer devastating injuries, develop chronic issues later in life, and have shorter lifespans on average.
as u/stairway-to-kevin is no longer with us (hopefully out doing
something more worthwhile in the Real World) I guess I have to be the
resident geneticist and read all this…
So basically what they’re describing overall isn’t really new and
hasn’t had major breakthroughs in recent years, and that’s why you may
not have heard about it in this context. Prenatal testing for specific
disease risks, e.g. both parents are carriers for Tay-Sachs, has been
going on since long before any of the “next” generations of sequencing.
I guess the big innovation that should prompt a sudden social change
right now is that there’s a concentrated community of people who are
really into eugenics and are particularly insecure about
fixated on IQ above all other metrics of health.
Polygenic risk scores started catching on more recently because of
the failure of simple genetic explanations for quantitative traits. The
reason we didn’t do embryo selection for height or IQ in the 20th
century is because we hadn’t found “the gene for height” or “the gene
for IQ” yet. Now the reason we don’t do it is because we’ve looked
thoroughly enough to be sure there is no such single gene. The
heritability of those quantitative traits can only be (partially)
explained by looking at thousands of genes at the same time. We still
don’t know “which gene does what”; we just have a minor probabilistic
prediction that someone with a certain genotype might be a certain
distance away from average in the predicted trait. But the math is
fuzzy, and if you’re trying to predict any individual case the error
bars may be wide.
There is a common misconception that genes are tied together in a
hopelessly complex web and that if we mess with one part of it the whole
thing will come crashing down.
Yeah I would be a little more cautious, but aside from the slim risk
of major unforeseeable catastrophe, there’s a vast risk of just not
really having any effect, or maybe even going in the opposite of the
desired direction. Likeforexample in the height chart, any particular
couple is probably not going to be spitting out sperm and eggs that are
far apart on the x-axis; if you were choosing between a boy with a
predicted height of 178 cm and a boy with a predicted height of 180 cm,
there’s a very good chance you’d guess wrong and get the slightly
shorter one. These risk scores are calibrated by analyzing a lot of
unrelated people; when you try to calculate those scores for a whole
bunch of eggs from the same two parents, there’s a lot less variance to
work with. You might have much better results sending out for sperm and
eggs from absolute strangers who donated them to a biobank and then
raising the child as your own. Not to mention genome-wide association
studies are cursed by “stratification”, i.e. maybe the researchers
didn’t just exclude all non-white participants but also accidentally had
more Swedes in one group and Spaniards in another, and the resulting
prediction error is going to be a lot more pronounced when you use
population-scale results to predict outcomes from a particular
couple.
At some point we have to take a step back and ask, what exactly is
the prospective parents’ purpose for having their own biological child
in the first place, vs. adopting one who already exists, vs. not having
a child at all? And even if your top priority is to produce the Optimal
Child, which of these specific factors matter to you the most? - you may
have to balance pros and cons of each embryo. And if there’s any
sentimentality in your vision of parenthood at all, how much of a gain
in any of these factors would you really want before it would be worth
using IVF (costly, may require numerous cycles before success, hardly
romantic) instead of doing it the old-fashioned way?
Or if your goal is simply to have a world with healthier smarter
taller people in the future (at least one of those values deserves a
little more examination, likely two), as some replies already say on
that same site, there are other non-genetic interventions we can do that
are much cheaper and much better proven, so maybe our time is better
spent persuading authorities to use those approaches than persuading
rich people to eke out one more tiny statistical advantage for their
kids who will already have so much.
If we simply gave intelligence tests to people who are already
participating in existing biobanks, we could increase the IQ gain from
embryo selection by about 70% or more.
Specifically, if we forced the sperm or egg recipients to choose on
that basis alone, instead of the things they usually go with like
ethnicity, hair and eye color, height, educational attainment,
interesting talents, …
tl;dr sure the tech exists, but the data to use it for any worthwhile
purpose is currently either poorly substantiated or well substantiated
to be marginal, and if you’re actually serious about having a kid you’re
going to have to confront an enormous tangle of conflicting values
beyond just a single fuzzy prediction - even two fuzzy predictions may
create a conflict. and in the end you’ll never even know what effect it
had
> maybe our time is better spent persuading authorities to use those approaches than persuading rich people to eke out one more tiny statistical advantage for their kids who will already have so much.
I think the unstated intention is that none of this is about bettering society. It's to have children that are better able to compete with other presumably-engineered kids in an increasingly unforgiving marketplace for socioeconomic position (recognizing the increasing wealth and income inequality and the failure of many institutions to take on the risks they did in the past to better society).
I think this is kind of an interesting debate to see unfold because it doesn't quite square with the other rationalist goal of "longtermism"; selecting individuals on relatively narrow criteria based on selection pressures that are foisted on them by only (very) modern society when we still have a relatively poor understanding of most complex disease seems like trying to send a man to the moon before learning to run.
Eugenics, or how to populate the world with huge body builders / olympic gymnasts who can’t count to ten and can barely speak, genius level mathematicians / olympic gymnasts who can’t lift more than a pencil and can barely speak, and uber enlightened philosophers / olympic gymnasts who can barely speak. And that 10/10 hot model looking guy who can speak but won’t have sex before marriage and will snitch on you for jaywalking.
I don’t know the exact quality of their predictor, but I have
a pretty good guess based on publicly available research which
they are likely using as their starting point. Assuming
they’ve produced something at least as good as what’s available in the
Educational Attainment 4 study, I think it’s likely
that the predictor correlates with measured IQ at about 0.3.
So how big would the gain be? Using some code from Gwern’s monster
post on embryo selection for intelligence, I’d estimate
that if both parents are of European ancestry [uh oh]
and you have 10 euploid embryos to pick from, the gain would be
about 5 IQ points. It’s plausible that
you would get up to maybe 40 euploid embryos if the
mother is young and you do multiple rounds of egg retrieval. In that
case, you could probably get a gain closer
to 7.5 points. If the mother is older it will be less. There’s
also a reduction in benefit if one of the parents is of non-european
ancestry, [oh no!] though I’m not sure exactly
how much. A safe estimate is that the expected
gain in non-Europeans is cut by a third. So if one parent is European
and the other is Chinese, for example, the expected IQ
gain would be about 4 points.
If you read “genetics” and “IQ” and thought “this is going to turn
into a white supremacist screed with no scientific basis” you win!
> This is an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that there aren't enough non-Europeans in the large biobanks on which these predictors are trained.
The very next sentence. Cmon now, no need to lie.
Not genesmith, just in favor of criticizing people for things they actually believe rather than blatant misrepresentations. Seriously, what was your goal with posting that?
Honestly my main goal was to highlight just how many times ~~you~~GeneSmith admits that the numbers he uses are actually just vague guesses pulled out of thin air. I didn't notice the part about Eurpoeans supposedly having better potential for eugenic intelligence enhancement until I was partway through.
I'll admit that I could have read the section more thoroughly but, let's be real, I'm not actually *incorrect* here. The post is outright claiming that white people have an advantage
Anyone reading this thread should take a moment to consider whether they want to participate in a community that upvotes misinformation.
You're double-downing on your mistake too for some reason. The post says Europeans have an advantage because the dataset being used was optimized only on European data, not because they are inherently better. This is not at all "white supremacy" or "unscientific." You *are* incorrect.
This seems pretty clearly to be an excuse for their lack of information. It doesn't have much to do with the actual claims being made, which are still based in white supremacy. What exactly are you trying to prove, here?
What exactly are the "actual claims being made" that are "based in white supremacy"?
GeneSmith attributed their estimate that Europeans benefit more from using the dataset to the fact that the dataset was optimized based on European data. If it were trained on Asian data, Asians would benefit more from using it. This is not complicated.
This one is tough, because I think (1) it IS a given that women
facing fertility should have access to IVF technology, and (2) once
we’re doing IVF, it seems downright cruel to not screen for things like
Tay Sachs when it’s perfectly possible.
Unfortunately this creates the rare actually slippery
slope.
I've really never bought into that particular bioethics """dilemma.""" The hazard isn't about physicians screening out genetic illness; the hazard lies in a political class deciding that being too Asian constitutes a genetic illness or whatever.
> hazard lies in a political class deciding that being too Asian constitutes a genetic illness or whatever.
Isn't this sort of already happening as elite colleges have applied measures (similar to those once used to exclude Jews) to limit the number of students of asian descent they admit?
I hear kind of a lot about the issue as an old friend is a little angry about it.
While I disagree with the effect size, can someone explain how this
is remotely similar to the eugenics that is bad? It’s pretty clear that
the slapped together intelligence selections are rationalist wet dreams
but I don’t think there is actual harm done to the family outside of
getting scammed by Dr. Anomaly (lol). Obviously if you’re doing IVF and
want a child, you’re going to want the healthy ones all else equal.
Yeah and imho that is where they cross the line into eugenocs (granted it is downvoted, but the comment just makes the lacl of any concern to make any of this generalized for everyone very clear.
A common pattern in transhumanist places. H+ also had it happen for example.
I may have missed that - when I read it it seemed like it was saying that there was more data for white people which would lead to higher IQ gains from selection. Relevant section:
> This is an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that there aren't enough non-Europeans in the large biobanks on which these predictors are trained.
I imagine Gwern says that white people are genetically smarter (or something vaguely obfuscating that statement) in his post which I did not read, but which was linked though.
He uses the example of a European and a Chinese parent; these guys usually put Asians above non-Ashkenazi Europeans in their genetic smarts rankings, so you're probably right about the data explanation (although it's cold comfort since we know they believe in ranking the races anyway).
Eugenics has historically had connotations of artificially pairing unwilling parents, forced sterilization, racism, and justification for genocide. Choosing embryos to avoid having genetic defects is common sense if it's possible for things that would be medically relevant to the child...
These people don't want to use embryonic selection to avoid genetic defects, though. This is explicitly about the eugenics-y aspects. They rely on well meaning people to only acknowledge the potential to prevent deadly or life ruining diseases without digging too deeply into who is involved in these organizations and what they've said and believe.
I was once one of those people, I didn't look too deeply into it and thought "less Harlequin ichthyosis == good, also this couldn't *possibly* be eugenics, no one would be that brazen" and unsurprisingly, I'm an idiot, and it turned out to be eugenics. During a job hunt I got recruited by one of LW-adjacent embryonic selection companies. Found out that one of the advisors for the company published a paper titled "Can ‘eugenics’ be defended?" The founder of the company literally said that *Gattaca* inspired him. I actually dug through their own website instead of just going off what a recruiter told me and they even market their services for straight up eugenics, as in they would select embryos for traits like intelligence etc.
It's about the eugenics.
The experience made me really reexamine my willingness to initially explain away literal eugenics when it was staring me in the face. I don't think embryonic selection, genetic modification, etc will ever be used ethically, to be honest, especially with these people running amuck.
Yeah, but it will also end up being used to over time eliminate other traits considered "undesirable" by society from the human population, like LGBTQ people, autistic people, disabled people, etc, and that robs humanity of a lot of color and richness in human experience, as well as the process only amplifying and reinforcing whatever cultural biases there are about who's "inferior" and who isn't. I personally find the idea of the slow death of many communities I'm a part of as we're genetically selected out of existence by the arbitrary whims of a bigoted society quite terrifying. Additionally, there are class effects. If rich, successful people can afford to generically modify their babies to be superior, while poor people can't, there'll be an ever-widening gap between the upper and lower classes.
personally i would be a little pissed off if the disability i was born with could have been cured but wasn't to add "color and richness" to my life lmao
Well, yeah. But I don’t ascribe much difference between a hypothetical future me that could have been born without a disability, versus a hypothetical future that still was born with a disability. I’d be perfectly fine with “me” not existing in that kind of scenario.
They don't genetically modify an embryo to not have a disability though, they just select an embryo to be born that doesn't have a disability and throw away the rest. So it wouldn't be you at all in a very real sense, not in the general sense of "you wouldn't be you without your disability." I'm not going to tell you how to feel about your own disability, that's not my place and everyone probably feels differently, I'm just trying to clarify what they're talking about, and the logic they follow, which is that if someone has/is going to have a disability, their life isn't worth living so might as well have a different baby.
I do understand that, it’s just that the “moral dilemma” as presented has never felt compelling to me. No matter whether it is actively selected or not, there’s only going to be one embryo being born (standard twin etc disclaimer). There’s always going to be a myriad of potential children that will never be born. Even if that selection was being made for purely arbitrary reasons and not for health/quality of life, the take that it is somehow “better” to leave it up to random chance is incomprehensible when in literally every other part of child rearing it’s considered good parenting to give them as many advantages as possible.
I think the pretty clear implication of this kind of thing is “lesser people (as defined by stereotypical LW, disabled people and people of lower intelligence) do not deserve the right to exist”, which leads to all the things you mentioned.
"I don't want my child to have a debilitating disability" and "I think people with debilitating disabilities don't deserve human rights" are really different statements. They might both be "eugenics" in a sufficiently broad definition of the term but they are not at all morally equivalent.
Yes, there are reasons to be concerned about the former, but that ain't one of them.
I fully agree - probably took a bit harder line opinion than I meant to.
I just think back to how disturbed I was by the Bostrom apology line of “I don’t support eugenics but I definitely support a whole lot of things that sound like eugenics”. At what point do we step too far? And I think there’s clear lines (controlling disease risk vs. picking arbitrary physical characteristics for your child), but we’ll increasingly be pushing up against those lines in a way that makes me uncomfortable as this kind of technology evolves.
I agree with you. It *is* a slope, and maybe a slippery one. But I think we face those kinds of trade-offs pretty often.
For example, as a parent, you're allowed to be a dick to your kid. It's known to be bad for them, and there's no real argument for doing it, but it's not illegal, because we've established this norm of "parental fuckery has to reach this pretty high bar to be worth a ban". There's no reason to set the bar exactly where we do, though, and it drifts somewhat (e.g. spanking your kid was normal a few decades ago, now it's kinda frowned-on).
Yeah I don't agree that selecting the embryo that has a lower genetic risk of cancer naturally leads to that conclusion about people with cancer due to a genetic predisposition. I think selecting for intelligence, facial features, or personality are all varying degrees of gross though. Definitely not a great piece in the context of LW but partially I posted in reaction to an increasing anti-IVF sentiment I am seeing in otherwise-inclusive spaces.
That’s fair and I get that there’s a pretty clear line between positive selections (making people not die of cancer) and weird ones (liking certain facial features over others). I just can’t really reconcile with the idea that if widespread trait selection was adopted across society, you’d basically be eliminating whole groups of people from future existence - and I’m not sure how we’re supposed to interpret what that means for people with disabilities that are currently alive.
I also agree that my argument’s pretty anti-IVF (a thing I fully support) and am not sure how to fully reconcile that one.
I think the trick to reconciling the ideas is to not confuse respect for a disabled person with respect for the concept of disability.
For example: It's important to respect people in wheelchairs and recognize that they are no less human than people who aren't, by e.g. ensuring that they have equal access to spaces and resources by means of ramps, elevators, etc.
But just because it's fine for people to be in a wheelchair doesn't mean it's fine to *put* someone in a wheelchair. You still take steps to prevent people from suffering leg and spine injuries.
While their disability doesn't make them less human in any way, it does reduce their quality of life. All else being equal, it would still have been better if they didn't end up in a wheelchair. Anybody in a wheelchair would be delighted to hear about a new treatment that would eliminate the need for wheelchairs in the future.
The same thing applies to preventing cancer in your children, naturally. If you don't intervene to negate your child's predisposition to cancer, that's qualitatively similar to letting them play next to your unfenced leg-crushing machine.
This argument does have the weakness that it's not too hard to apply it to the "weird" non-essential interventions that might still improve one's life, like the aforementioned intelligence and personality traits. I don't have a good resolution to that one yet.
Sure, to some extent. Being fat is associated with worse health outcomes, yeah, but from what I understand most of the QoL losses from being fat are social ones rather than physical.
Some fat people do actually enjoy being fat, or are at least neutral about it. A lot more would probably feel that way if there were no social stigma to it. If there *were* no social stigma, I can't imagine it having a much bigger effect on QoL than, say, intelligence. (This is just a hunch though; I don't have any numbers to back me up here.)
So eliminating fatness wouldn't be the same kind of unambiguous positive that eliminating paraplegia would be. Instead, you'd need to take the multipronged approach of making fatness more avoidable for those who don't want it, safer for those who don't mind it, and more accepted on both the individual and conceptual level.
I appreciate your comments and I'm worried my argument might be borderline pro-eugenics which is certainly something I don't want to support. It's a tough question, and one I'm grappling with as the only way I can have kids with my partner is IVF (and I have pro-cancer/mental illness genes).
In your case, if you are in financial capacity to do it, I think it is a moral duty to use embryo selection. As it may might avoid harm to your children and all their descendants.
Okay I hate this but I do actually find the section about the
‘prettiness’ of the embryo impacting whether or not it’s selected to be
absolutely hilarious.
This embryo is ugly and will only be transferred as a last resort
Yes, this is what happens if infants are left unattended in a cold area. Unfortunately for the infant, the loss of oxygen in their skin isn't visible under that beautiful blue pigment the parents gave their designer baby.
[Jay Eaton](https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/) had the best take on it - a lot of messes - genes can be pretty unpredictable in practice - terrible consumerism and an unavoidable rate of things like congenital deafness because to make a genetically engineered catgirl, it turns out you need to monkey with genes with the ears and guess where that can go wrong!
I always wondered how that worked….
Interesting medical advice being offered here.
This guy: there’s a meaningful difference between PGT labs, so pick a good one
Also this guy: legit labs won’t let you do eugenics, so I recommend back-alley embryo screening hookups from Gwern or the guy who published The Egalitarian Fallacy: Are group differences compatible with political liberalism?
He then finishes with this gem: > the next 30 years will likely see the greatest crop of geniuses and athletes the human species has ever produced
I suspect that taking Gwern’s advice on embryo selection might have the opposite outcome.
goddammit
as u/stairway-to-kevin is no longer with us (hopefully out doing something more worthwhile in the Real World) I guess I have to be the resident geneticist and read all this…
So basically what they’re describing overall isn’t really new and hasn’t had major breakthroughs in recent years, and that’s why you may not have heard about it in this context. Prenatal testing for specific disease risks, e.g. both parents are carriers for Tay-Sachs, has been going on since long before any of the “next” generations of sequencing. I guess the big innovation that should prompt a sudden social change right now is that there’s a concentrated community of people who are really into eugenics and are particularly
insecure aboutfixated on IQ above all other metrics of health.Polygenic risk scores started catching on more recently because of the failure of simple genetic explanations for quantitative traits. The reason we didn’t do embryo selection for height or IQ in the 20th century is because we hadn’t found “the gene for height” or “the gene for IQ” yet. Now the reason we don’t do it is because we’ve looked thoroughly enough to be sure there is no such single gene. The heritability of those quantitative traits can only be (partially) explained by looking at thousands of genes at the same time. We still don’t know “which gene does what”; we just have a minor probabilistic prediction that someone with a certain genotype might be a certain distance away from average in the predicted trait. But the math is fuzzy, and if you’re trying to predict any individual case the error bars may be wide.
Yeah I would be a little more cautious, but aside from the slim risk of major unforeseeable catastrophe, there’s a vast risk of just not really having any effect, or maybe even going in the opposite of the desired direction. Likeforexample in the height chart, any particular couple is probably not going to be spitting out sperm and eggs that are far apart on the x-axis; if you were choosing between a boy with a predicted height of 178 cm and a boy with a predicted height of 180 cm, there’s a very good chance you’d guess wrong and get the slightly shorter one. These risk scores are calibrated by analyzing a lot of unrelated people; when you try to calculate those scores for a whole bunch of eggs from the same two parents, there’s a lot less variance to work with. You might have much better results sending out for sperm and eggs from absolute strangers who donated them to a biobank and then raising the child as your own. Not to mention genome-wide association studies are cursed by “stratification”, i.e. maybe the researchers didn’t just exclude all non-white participants but also accidentally had more Swedes in one group and Spaniards in another, and the resulting prediction error is going to be a lot more pronounced when you use population-scale results to predict outcomes from a particular couple.
At some point we have to take a step back and ask, what exactly is the prospective parents’ purpose for having their own biological child in the first place, vs. adopting one who already exists, vs. not having a child at all? And even if your top priority is to produce the Optimal Child, which of these specific factors matter to you the most? - you may have to balance pros and cons of each embryo. And if there’s any sentimentality in your vision of parenthood at all, how much of a gain in any of these factors would you really want before it would be worth using IVF (costly, may require numerous cycles before success, hardly romantic) instead of doing it the old-fashioned way?
Or if your goal is simply to have a world with healthier smarter taller people in the future (at least one of those values deserves a little more examination, likely two), as some replies already say on that same site, there are other non-genetic interventions we can do that are much cheaper and much better proven, so maybe our time is better spent persuading authorities to use those approaches than persuading rich people to eke out one more tiny statistical advantage for their kids who will already have so much.
Specifically, if we forced the sperm or egg recipients to choose on that basis alone, instead of the things they usually go with like ethnicity, hair and eye color, height, educational attainment, interesting talents, …
tl;dr sure the tech exists, but the data to use it for any worthwhile purpose is currently either poorly substantiated or well substantiated to be marginal, and if you’re actually serious about having a kid you’re going to have to confront an enormous tangle of conflicting values beyond just a single fuzzy prediction - even two fuzzy predictions may create a conflict. and in the end you’ll never even know what effect it had
4d6 pick highest 3, assign at will.
If you read “genetics” and “IQ” and thought “this is going to turn into a white supremacist screed with no scientific basis” you win!
This one is tough, because I think (1) it IS a given that women facing fertility should have access to IVF technology, and (2) once we’re doing IVF, it seems downright cruel to not screen for things like Tay Sachs when it’s perfectly possible.
Unfortunately this creates the rare actually slippery slope.
These people are getting more and more frightening the more I see of them.
Charisma is an automatic dump stat
While I disagree with the effect size, can someone explain how this is remotely similar to the eugenics that is bad? It’s pretty clear that the slapped together intelligence selections are rationalist wet dreams but I don’t think there is actual harm done to the family outside of getting scammed by Dr. Anomaly (lol). Obviously if you’re doing IVF and want a child, you’re going to want the healthy ones all else equal.
if reddit wanted to keep my content they should have behaved better
Okay I hate this but I do actually find the section about the ‘prettiness’ of the embryo impacting whether or not it’s selected to be absolutely hilarious.
2meirl
[deleted]