I think we put too much weight on intelligence as the factor differentiating innovators from the rest. If we were to clone some great scientists from the past I believe would be underwhelmed.
Not because these aren’t brilliant people but because brilliance isn’t the most important factor in innovation. Rather, innovation is driven by people who are exposed to a novel environment and are just smart enough to not ignore it.
Bill Gates’ highschool was the only one in the US with a computer. Albert Einstein was working in a patent office where he saw a conga-line of patents discussing how to standardize the measurement of time across vast geographies.
Both brilliant people. Both exposed to a novel societal idea. Thankfully they were smart enough to run with it.
> but because brilliance isn’t the most important factor in innovation
I suspect having at least moderately wealthy parents is a huge factor. I'm sure a lot of potentially great scientists died unknown for absence of those.
Aye - having the choice to not take the economically best action is a unique one. On average you would expect this to be born out in most academic fields where the researcher either comes from a background enabling their exploration on economically viable terms - or academia is surprisingly the most economic choice.
>Albert Einstein was working in a patent office where he saw a conga-line of patents discussing how to standardize the measurement of time across vast geographies.
I don't thik this was a relevant factor. Certainly not as much as reading Poincare's work (which anyone had access to).
No matter how well you eat and get educated, you are not going to be able to do even a fraction of what John von Neumann or Srinivasa Ramanujan were able to do. And very often people like them were able to do that despite all the odds, not because they had the best opportunities.
On the contrary, it indicates that truly talented and capable people are rare. Having more of them would allow the rest of us to live under less adverse conditions, find a way to become smarter and live longer.
The point is that we could have dozens of von Neumann's twin brothers helping us to speed up that process, but we choose not to for no good reason.
Even one additional Von Neumann would be great. More would be fantastic.
And would be associated with a lot of other more impactful people.
The “good” reason for not providing better conditions is we don’t have a system for that.
My vote would be that the value of all raw natural resources not created by human beings efforts be considered a joint inheritance.
The raw value of them being shared by all equally with a focus on health and education for children, and keeping adults above survival mode. We would all benefit from that investment, even the rich.
The efforts of those who extract and process them, as with any human added value, would be rewarded by the competitive marketplace as usual.
Depends how cheap gene editing gets. If you can mass-produce adenoviruses that improve iq 15 points and health significantly, that's going to be way cheaper than nutrition, forget education and of course opportunity.
Of course, better genes means nutrition, education and opportunity go further
The issue with eugenics isn't the fundamental science, it's that the "elites" in charge of it are simply loaded with cognitive biases to support their (often inherited, arbitrary, or fortunate) positions.
Almost all solutions to actually solving environmentalism and sustainability at a long term global level involve lots of complicated policies which seemingly can only be accomplished with a higher degrees of altruism, better intelligence of multiple flavors, etc.
We kind of NEED a general increase to intellect and ability. Also would save on rising health care costs.
Ironically, we'd need some sort of eugenics for the ruling elite to truly raise them to a point that they could then responsibly apply eugenics to the rest of the population.
The "elite" will probably start doing this in the next 50 years. Honestly I'm shocked it hasn't started in my lifetime (I'm ~50 years old)
> The challenge is the human proteins needed to make each of these to happen can conflict with each other. The proteins — created by the genes — needed for risk taking may be the ones that dampen good listening. There are genetic trade offs, in that you cannot optimize all traits. In other words there are genetic costs for each trait. To raise IQ might cost lowering something else, such as empathy. It’s not that there is a zero-sum quantity being conserved, it’s that genes cannot do all that is possible. They are hugely constrained by each other. It is like trying to design a machine: it cannot optimize all properties; it cannot be fastest, lightest, strongest, and cheapest at the same time. Everything is a trade off. Performance, reliability, speed, cost — all are trade off between them. Genes and traits also operate under the same regime of trade offs. There are no free lunches.
I would say it is partially true. Expression of a gene (or even changes in its expression levels) may affect detrimentally the product of other genes. But, on the other hand, these changes can be compensated (for instance) by “beneficial” epistatic interactions coming from additional genes, allowing the individual to keep its phenotype. Biology is tangled and messy, after all.
When things are just.. wrong, there's not much reason to be specific. Especially when gwern.net has multiple long-form blog posts discussing these topics
Kelly is making extremely sweeping broad claims based on no evidence and flimsy analogies which are obviously wrong - humans are not carefully-engineered cars competing in a free market where cars could exist on a Pareto frontier (which itself would be a rather questionable claim...), they are organisms under a bombardment of mutations constantly happening and those mutations being very slowly purged by natural selection over thousands of generations. It is not surprising that there could be 'free lunches', anymore than it is surprising that there might be typos left in a file after a cat walked across your keyboard and you tried to fix it.
I don't need to provide any references because Kelly didn't provide any of his own: what is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. I shouldn't be held to a higher standard than he is simply because he said his claims first. He's not a geneticist or psychologist or otherwise working in this area, so there shouldn't be even a presumption here that he is probably right if he isn't going to provide any evidence or sources or more convincing arguments than 'there just can't be free lunches, there can't!'.
I am being rude here because I am fed up with decades of people making these sweeping assertions about genetic correlations while simply completely ignoring the large literature actually measuring these FUD bugaboos. Kelly, and everyone making those arguments, deserves nothing but mockery until they show any sign of catching up to the literature as of, let's say, 1990 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genetic_correlati...), and while we're at it, I could wish that they would understand the idea of 'adding two variables before doing selection' (I mean, index selection in genetics only goes back to the 1940s or so, you can't expect people to understand such cutting-edge concepts).
And he can't provide those references because it's not true: the genetic correlations between IQ and other traits are pervasively positive, and Kelly would know that if he spent any time looking into it. In fact, you would have to go thoroughly through the list of known genetic correlations with IQ before you would find any that are bad, contrary to his assertion that there is always a strong tradeoff in a myriad of ways. (I'll save you the effort: out of hundreds of reasonably reliable genetic correlations of IQ/gf with other traits like diseases, the bad ones worth mentioning are myopia, possibly allergies (I forget if that was just phenotypic), anorexia, and autism spectrum disorder checklist self-reports. And I think the last one is probably bogus anyway due to measurement issues.)
I agree that the author acts recklessly and presents unwarranted conclusions. That said, in case of widespread genetic engineering, I would expect potential parents to make more specific choices that will result in some real tradeoffs.
For example, it seems that longevity and fertility are somewhat negatively correlated, though this is precisely a field of study that requires a lot more research, because longevity was, until recently, a very underfunded topic.
Most people, if they had a choice, would probably opt for longevity, given that you can now "outsource" reproduction to IVF and similar techniques. But over several generations, any small effects may be amplified.
The genetics of color blindness is by nature unfairly biased against men. Hope we can dedicate ourselves to fix these things instead of financing more weapons and armies.
I mean, a CRISPR based cure has been successfully tested in monkeys as early as 2010, but there is still nothing on the market.
Color blindness isn't fatal and its effect on quality of life is light to moderate.
CRISPR is a fairly dangerous technology and it makes sense to start applying it to serious conditions first. If you accidentally kill someone trying to cure their color blindness, the whole humanity will lose out, because the regulators will go crazy and slow down the field by 10 more years.
True, but either way, we would have eliminated one case of color blindness!
Satirical answer obviously. But the “right” risk level for human experimentation is such a strange problem.
I expect that just as humans generally fear air travel mishaps far more than far more dangerous activities, we have an aversion to (informed consent) human experiments that is probably too conservative.
Except when we take into account the real and damaging second order effects of outsized fear.
The victim was a young kid which had 50+ years of life before him, and he was able to manage his condition fairly well prior to the experiment.
Add some shady details in the informed consent process, and the reaction of the public to his death was so overwhelmingly negative that gene therapy took a massive hit.
We could mass breed humans in conditions currently faced by pigs in high rise pig farms to brute force parts of this process. Not perfect for traits that require a nurturing and stimulating environment, but great for several health related ones, probably. Maybe stimulation could be provided through welded on VR equipment, AI companions and treadmills? I am sure there are plenty of ways to provide "fake" stimulation to those genetic research farm humans to increase the range of research possible.
When hypothetically exploring fantastic but at least borderline feasible ideas, I like to turn off my moral and ethical filters. Exploring extreme, frightening, exciting, terrifying, sickening ideas, assuming I stand on the winners/good/not-bad side of things. It can be refreshing, almost exhilarating, depending on how strong you imagine it.
It is crazy that we ban research on cloning, and still don't have many clones of successful scientists.