What would you say to a potential attendee who has a legitimate interest in reprogenetics’ emancipatory capacity, but is concerned
To answer the question very literally, I would love to talk to such a person as much as they’re willing, to better understand their experiences / reasons / etc.; I wouldn’t necessarily be able to address everyone’s concerns a priori given my current level of understanding.
In what follows I’ll try to answer generically anyway:
is concerned that the conference will be taken over by discussions of human biodiversity
A few points:
Event experience. I imagine such a person might be worried about non-speaker attendees, and their ideologies and behaviors, and the resulting culture at the conference. I’m not totally sure what to say about this.
It would not be feasible, let alone advisable, for me to try to filter attendees based on their personal views on some issue. There may be one or two hundred attendees, or more. I am the sole full-time organizer, with much appreciated but part-time support from Kali.
Beyond feasibility, I don’t know if this is advisable. I would instead intend to simply make the conference be what it is supposed to be, in terms of having good and good-hearted speakers and attendees; if there are racists who are hoping to all get together and, IDK, do whatever they do, then I would intend and hope that they would just lose interest. This is a conference for science, technology, fertility, ethics, building, etc. I think that trying to police people’s attendance at an event based on their private views (if that’s the proposal) is generally toxic as well as high-cost.
In accordance with that intention, I am putting most of my recruitment efforts into finding high-quality expert academic speakers as well as speakers from pioneering tech companies, and I will be pushing for more junior scientists to attend.
Further in accordance with that intention, I would ask people with a stake in reprotech and reprogenetics—serious scientists, parents, industry people, serious bioethicists, good-hearted altruists, etc.--to attend, and invite others to attend, and give voice to good visions for these technologies.
That said, I do reserve the right to reject some attendees, and am willing to do so, including on the basis that they’re advocating racism, racist political stances or policies, white supremacy, etc. Speakers and attendees agree to this code of conduct in order to register: https://www.reproductivefrontiers.com/code-of-conduct So, if an attendee is going around advocating for deporting brown people or something, I would be likely to have them leave.
There are a few specific people who I would preemptively reject from attending and refund their ticket, on various grouds such as advocating racism.
Event goals. I’m in charge of the schedule, and both my personal and my professional goals are to help support the field of advanced reprotech and reprogenetics, by making the field well-resourced, sane, momentum-ful, lively, convivial, welcoming, in order to emancipate and empower future children. (With one major personal background motivation being HIA for reducing X-risk.) These goals push pretty strongly against having the field be related to racism or other extremist views.
Event topics.
Human biodiversity (real or imagined) is pretty much entirely off-topic for this conference.
The only relevance I’m aware of is the fact (IIUC; not an expert) that polygenic predictors trained on individuals from one ancestry group tend to transfer imperfectly to individuals from another ancestry group. (This could be for any number of reasons, some known and some unknown, e.g. different linkage disequilibrium patterns between causal variants and SNPs within different ancestry groups; environments that discriminate based on ancestry group and thereby induce different gene-outcome causal pathways; etc.) For that reason, there is a potential inequality of access to reprogenetics (and generally to genetic medicine) between ancestry groups, which argues e.g. for a better understanding of causality in genes and for more diverse data collection.
Because human biodiversity is off-topic, there won’t be talks on that topic. I suppose a speaker could “go rogue” or something. Then they wouldn’t be invited back.
Event speakers.
Dr. Anomaly is speaking because he’s the spokesperson for Herasight, an embryo screening startup that is unique in offering polygenic predictions for the expected IQ of embryos. His talk is about informed choice in polygenic embryo screening.
Prof. Hsu spoke last year because he’s an expert on using big data for polygenic prediction, and he’s the founder of Genomic Prediction, the first company to offer polygenic embryo screening. He gave a talk on the genomics of traits, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n64rrRPtCa8 Nothing about race as I recall.
If a speaker were to propose to give a talk about race differences or something, I would reject that talk, but of course none have done so.
Past event experience.
I was quite busy with operations, so I did not have a great finger on the pulse of last year’s event. I regret that and will aim to do the opposite this year, though will realistically still be quite busy. So I can’t speak all that well to what it was like.
That said, my conversations were generally about fieldbuilding and science and technology and similar.
To answer the question very literally, I would love to talk to such a person as much as they’re willing, to better understand their experiences / reasons / etc.; I wouldn’t necessarily be able to address everyone’s concerns a priori given my current level of understanding.
In what follows I’ll try to answer generically anyway:
A few points:
Event experience. I imagine such a person might be worried about non-speaker attendees, and their ideologies and behaviors, and the resulting culture at the conference. I’m not totally sure what to say about this.
It would not be feasible, let alone advisable, for me to try to filter attendees based on their personal views on some issue. There may be one or two hundred attendees, or more. I am the sole full-time organizer, with much appreciated but part-time support from Kali.
Beyond feasibility, I don’t know if this is advisable. I would instead intend to simply make the conference be what it is supposed to be, in terms of having good and good-hearted speakers and attendees; if there are racists who are hoping to all get together and, IDK, do whatever they do, then I would intend and hope that they would just lose interest. This is a conference for science, technology, fertility, ethics, building, etc. I think that trying to police people’s attendance at an event based on their private views (if that’s the proposal) is generally toxic as well as high-cost.
In accordance with that intention, I am putting most of my recruitment efforts into finding high-quality expert academic speakers as well as speakers from pioneering tech companies, and I will be pushing for more junior scientists to attend.
Further in accordance with that intention, I would ask people with a stake in reprotech and reprogenetics—serious scientists, parents, industry people, serious bioethicists, good-hearted altruists, etc.--to attend, and invite others to attend, and give voice to good visions for these technologies.
That said, I do reserve the right to reject some attendees, and am willing to do so, including on the basis that they’re advocating racism, racist political stances or policies, white supremacy, etc. Speakers and attendees agree to this code of conduct in order to register: https://www.reproductivefrontiers.com/code-of-conduct So, if an attendee is going around advocating for deporting brown people or something, I would be likely to have them leave.
There are a few specific people who I would preemptively reject from attending and refund their ticket, on various grouds such as advocating racism.
Event goals. I’m in charge of the schedule, and both my personal and my professional goals are to help support the field of advanced reprotech and reprogenetics, by making the field well-resourced, sane, momentum-ful, lively, convivial, welcoming, in order to emancipate and empower future children. (With one major personal background motivation being HIA for reducing X-risk.) These goals push pretty strongly against having the field be related to racism or other extremist views.
Event topics.
Human biodiversity (real or imagined) is pretty much entirely off-topic for this conference.
The only relevance I’m aware of is the fact (IIUC; not an expert) that polygenic predictors trained on individuals from one ancestry group tend to transfer imperfectly to individuals from another ancestry group. (This could be for any number of reasons, some known and some unknown, e.g. different linkage disequilibrium patterns between causal variants and SNPs within different ancestry groups; environments that discriminate based on ancestry group and thereby induce different gene-outcome causal pathways; etc.) For that reason, there is a potential inequality of access to reprogenetics (and generally to genetic medicine) between ancestry groups, which argues e.g. for a better understanding of causality in genes and for more diverse data collection.
Because human biodiversity is off-topic, there won’t be talks on that topic. I suppose a speaker could “go rogue” or something. Then they wouldn’t be invited back.
Event speakers.
Dr. Anomaly is speaking because he’s the spokesperson for Herasight, an embryo screening startup that is unique in offering polygenic predictions for the expected IQ of embryos. His talk is about informed choice in polygenic embryo screening.
Prof. Hsu spoke last year because he’s an expert on using big data for polygenic prediction, and he’s the founder of Genomic Prediction, the first company to offer polygenic embryo screening. He gave a talk on the genomics of traits, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n64rrRPtCa8 Nothing about race as I recall.
If a speaker were to propose to give a talk about race differences or something, I would reject that talk, but of course none have done so.
Past event experience.
I was quite busy with operations, so I did not have a great finger on the pulse of last year’s event. I regret that and will aim to do the opposite this year, though will realistically still be quite busy. So I can’t speak all that well to what it was like.
That said, my conversations were generally about fieldbuilding and science and technology and similar.