I’ll use my time on the soapbox to make an ancillary point: that EAs and especially rationalists are on the whole quite naive about genetics, and in particular are too enthusiastic about the use of genetics knowledge to facilitate biological enhancements in some way or other. To be clear, I’m actually more bullish in principle than many of my colleagues regarding more widespread use of, say, polygenic scores—for reference, I’m probably a bit less positive on the idea than, say, Shai Carmi. But rationalists and some EAs seem to think that genetics is both a much more important determinant of traits than is actually true, and also that modifying genetics or applying genetics knowledge is much more tractable than it really is. Like, it’s not reflexive Luddism that’s preventing you from being able to improve your offspring’s IQ by +10 over baseline, it’s primarily the limits of our abilities at present (and even what’s feasible in ten years) to link genetic changes to traits, or to accurately perform embryo selection and gene editing.
I realize I’m about 4 months late to this conversation so you’re likely the only one who will ever read this. But enhancing IQ or other traits is actually quite feasible with our current technology. Shai Carmi’s paper “Screening Human Embryos for Polygenic Traits Has Limited Utility” used predictors that were already two years out of date by the time he published and are even more out of date now. You could raise IQ by 2-8 points in expectation today, with the exact amount depending most on the age of the mother, number of egg retrievals completed, genetic ancestry of the parents, and quality of the IVF clinic.
The effect size for type 2 diabetes and height is even larger because our genetic predictors for those traits are better.
The main thing preventing us from getting to +10 IQ points right now is lack of data. We have all the genomes we could ever need. But no one has phenotypes them; we don’t have IQ test scores, or some highly correlated proxy like SAT score.
I’ll use my time on the soapbox to make an ancillary point: that EAs and especially rationalists are on the whole quite naive about genetics, and in particular are too enthusiastic about the use of genetics knowledge to facilitate biological enhancements in some way or other. To be clear, I’m actually more bullish in principle than many of my colleagues regarding more widespread use of, say, polygenic scores—for reference, I’m probably a bit less positive on the idea than, say, Shai Carmi. But rationalists and some EAs seem to think that genetics is both a much more important determinant of traits than is actually true, and also that modifying genetics or applying genetics knowledge is much more tractable than it really is. Like, it’s not reflexive Luddism that’s preventing you from being able to improve your offspring’s IQ by +10 over baseline, it’s primarily the limits of our abilities at present (and even what’s feasible in ten years) to link genetic changes to traits, or to accurately perform embryo selection and gene editing.
I realize I’m about 4 months late to this conversation so you’re likely the only one who will ever read this. But enhancing IQ or other traits is actually quite feasible with our current technology. Shai Carmi’s paper “Screening Human Embryos for Polygenic Traits Has Limited Utility” used predictors that were already two years out of date by the time he published and are even more out of date now. You could raise IQ by 2-8 points in expectation today, with the exact amount depending most on the age of the mother, number of egg retrievals completed, genetic ancestry of the parents, and quality of the IVF clinic.
The effect size for type 2 diabetes and height is even larger because our genetic predictors for those traits are better.
The main thing preventing us from getting to +10 IQ points right now is lack of data. We have all the genomes we could ever need. But no one has phenotypes them; we don’t have IQ test scores, or some highly correlated proxy like SAT score.
I wrote a whole post about this on LessWrong if you want to learn more