Crowstep
1mo ago
I wouldn't be so skeptical. As the article says, the first embryos have already been implanted. Plus, Heliospect is not the only company offering this service. Steven Hsu's company Genomic Prediction did the same thing for eccentric pronatalists Simone and Malcolm Collins. The first embryo selected child (that is publicly known) is toddling around a house in Pennsylvania.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I think you're right. Hell, I thought that until I read your post. Then I remembered that 'OK Boomer' was a meme several years before the pandemic.
I assume that Zoomer was just meant as a portmanteau of Boomer and Gen Z (which itself was based on the letter convention that started with Gen X).
Crowstep
1mo ago
Well it looks like embryo selection for IQ is here.
A US startup, using data from the UK Biobank, is offering embryo selection for “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants”, including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.
What surprises me most about this is that they were able to use the Biobank data, and that the head of the Biobank is defending its use. The Biobank is, as I understand, the world's best source of genetic data and I had always hoped that it would be used for this kind of liberal eugenics. However I'd assumed that doing so would be hampered by 'bioethicists' or at least the default political caution of these kind of institutions. However, the head of the Biobank seems to...think this is good?
UK Biobank … has confirmed that its analyses of our data have been used solely for their approved purpose to generate genetic risk scores for particular conditions, and are exploring the use of their findings for preimplantation screening in accordance with relevant regulation in the US where Heliospect is based. This is entirely consistent with our access conditions. By making data available, UK Biobank is allowing discoveries to emerge that would not otherwise have been possible, saving lives and preventing disability and misery.
Well that's a pleasant surprise. I guess I shouldn't be too shocked that the head of a massive genetics project actually understands the implications of his scientific field, but it's great to have my default cynicism proven wrong.
The quotes from the 'bioethicists' are maddening, of course:
Dagan Wells, a professor of reproductive genetics at University of Oxford, asked: “Is this a test too far, do we really want it? It feels to me that this is a debate that the public has not really had an opportunity to fully engage in at this point.”
Not an argument, he's just vaguely gesturing at the implication that it might be bad. It's also unclear why, in a context where IVF is already legal and accepted by almost everyone, this needs to be subject to a public debate. This is just IVF with more informed choices over which embryo to implant.
Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, in California, said: “One of the biggest problems is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics.” The rollout of such technologies, she said, “reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.
Translation: This scientific advance is bad because it reminds people of facts which I am politically uncomfortable with.
If being slim, happy, kind, law-abiding, rich or intelligent is better than being fat, depressed, cruel, criminal, poor or stupid, and if these things are affected by genetics (which they are) then there is such a thing as superior or inferior genetics.
Either Ms Hasson believes that genes don't influence anything (in which case she should not be working at a centre for genetics) or she believes that all human characteristics are equally good (in which case she should not use the term 'ethicist' in her title). Or perhaps she is a bioethicist who believes in neither biology nor ethics.
By late 2023, the founders of Heliospect claimed to have already analysed and helped select embryos for five couples, which had subsequently been implanted through IVF. “There are babies on the way,”
This is probably the most important part in my mind. It will be extremely hard to argue against embryo selection when there are happy, healthy, intelligent children running around. In the same way that skepticism around IVF vanished as the first IVF babies grew up, there will one day be embryo-selected adults giving interviews on TV, eloquently defending it.
Tiger mothers of the world, rejoice. You can now give your kids a heads-up that actually works, and doesn't require you driving them to extra-curriculars all the time.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I may have misunderstood, but it kinda sound like you think that the Democrat staffers who wrote that press release were thinking 'black men use crypto to hide their drug-dealing money and avoid paying for the children they walked out on, we'd better tell them that they have our support'.
Even in politics, I think you'd struggle to find that kind of jet-black cynicism
Crowstep
1mo ago
I recall an investigation in Australia where of the 200 or so alleged druggings, none of the women actually had rohypnol in their systems. What they did have was alcohol and other recreational drugs.
We also had a moral panic in the UK a few years ago about needle spiking (rapist stabs a woman with a syringe containing a sedative). The police confirmed there were no confirmed cases at all.
That said, our country's most prolific rapist actually did rape hundreds of young men with the drug, so it has been used for that. But I think in most cases, it's an explanation/excuse for women who get black out drunk and get taken advantage of.
Crowstep
1mo ago
People may gamble more, or less than they have done in the recent or distant past. Certainly the recent SCOTUS decision has made online gambling far more popular compared to the recent past, but thinking of men drinking in taverns in frontier, it wouldn't shock me if gambling was far more common then. Historic moralising certainly focuses on gambling to a degree which seems weird to my modern ears.
However, your point didn't argue that advertising has increased gambling rates relative to some counterfactual. You argued that:
Americans buy lotto tickets and gamble on their phone because of advertisements. Americans buy overpriced shoes and other items because of advertisements.
In contrast with:
[Engaging in] consumer activity for purely rational reasons, after a full assessment of the merits of the activity compared to alternatives, and with full knowledge of which activities produce the most happiness
Which to me implies that if it weren't for advertising and marketing, this is what they would be doing.
I'm not a sports guy myself, but aside from the gambling aspect, I think collective entertainment is basically a good thing. It's good when you and your neighbours like the same things and have a common identity and basic understanding of the world. It's good when people socialise together in person, even if it is just to watch big men throw and kick a ball. Church would probably be better for aggregate happiness and sense of community, but we work with what we've got.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Americans buy lotto tickets and gamble on their phone because of advertisements
People have been gambling since before recorded history, all across the world.
Americans buy overpriced shoes and other items because of advertisements.
People have also been engaging in conspicuous consumption since before recorded history.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I'm tempted to say 'never'. Clothing has always been an expression of identity, whether the identifying characteristic is ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, wealth, profession, religion or any others you can think of. A muslim woman who wears a headscarf does so as her everyday dress, but it is also explicitly religious/ethnic dress.
The Scottish highlanders wore kilts for hundreds of years because they were practical, but they were also aware the entire time that the lowlanders didn't wear kilts. The identity around the kilt was no doubt strengthened during the Jacobite rebellion and during its aftermath (when it was banned by the government in order to suppress highland identity). So if you want a a particular date for when the kilt became more symbolic than day-to-day, I'd say then.
Crowstep
1mo ago
I mean, you can frame national dress and national identity that way, sure. But it seems awfully uncharitable.
Is every Bavarian wearing lederhosen or a dirndl thinking about how unlike the Berliners they are? When the Japanese wear kimonos to weddings and festivals, are they mainly thinking about they're not like China or Korea?
Or is it only Scottish national dress that gets defined in this way?
Scots wear the national dress the same way every country's national dress gets worn. I can't think of a single country where the national dress is worn as everyday clothing. We all wear blue jeans and business suits as part of global culture.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Scotsmen wear kilts now, unselfconsciously and unironically. There are three main cases where they are worn:
- As formal dress, usually with black tie accompaniments like bow ties. Think weddings, graduations, proms, formal birthday parties.
- For things related to Scottish heritage, i.e. Burns Night, Hogmanay (New Year's), ceilidhs (group folk dancing)
- For sport, usually with thick football/rugby socks and boots, plus team jerseys
Now of course, that doesn't mean that Scotsmen wear them every day. The only guys who do that are really into their Scottish nationalism, and usually members of the underclass or hippies. I suppose because they lack status in regular society, they attach themselves to their national identity more strongly. Typically they wear something like this.
In the lowlands, kilts were never everyday dress. They were highland dress that was only adopted by lowlanders after the military threat from the highland was vanquished and the kilt was safe to become an expression of Scottish identity more broadly.
Crowstep
1mo ago
From a gut feeling, collective bargaining feels more acceptable if exploited factory workers do it than if a cartel does it. But messing with the forces of a functioning market is rarely beneficial.
A trade union is a cartel, it's just a cartel of individual employees rather than individual CEOs. The goals are the same (artificially raise prices by limiting competition).
A world without trade unions is a world where average wages are higher, employment is higher and consumer goods cost less.
I realise that I'm basically agreeing with your larger post, just pointing out that you shouldn't be afraid of taking your ideas to their logical conclusion. If rent-seeking is bad, then it's bad even if the guys doing it have working-class authenticity.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Back in my single days, I would pay for the first round of drinks, for the mating ritual.
80% of the time, she would offer to pay for the next round, which I was fine with. I don't think it was a political thing (it was too common for that). Rather, I think she was trying to avoid me thinking worse of her, which I may do if I thought she was a gold-digger or whatever.
Interestingly, if she didn't offer to pay for the next round, that was a pretty reliable signal that she'd say no to a second date.
Crowstep
1mo ago
The Motte loves long form posts about niche interests, I'm sure it would go down very well.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Well there are tons of weight loss groups full of women who do actually want to lose weight. Something like Weightwatchers comes to mind. And it's not as if fat women are turning down Ozempic and all these new drugs.
But I agree, there is something strange about approaching it like this. I would guess it's simply that most women in these groups have tried to lose weight and failed. Rather than simply resign themselves to a life of not being pretty, they'd rather try and enforce consensus in such a way that favours them.
Unfortunately, while the 'in this house we believe' approach may work with regards to public morality, it is puny in the face of human sexuality. Nobody, men or women, likes looking at fat people. And you can't shame men into finding you hot.
Crowstep
2mo ago
You will start losing weight if you calorie restrict below your consumption
Start, but not maintain, which is what we actually care about.
There is no such thing as CICO advocacy
There absolutely is, there are people engaging in it right now in this very thread, arguing that fat people are fat because they lack discipline and not because of metabolic dysregulation. You're doing it yourself (I think, your prose is a little too poetic to draw an actual position out of cleanly).
Are humans a special sort of animal? Does not every other animal gorge themselves in times of plenty and starve in times of lack?
Yes, and then they rapidly return to their weight set points, as do humans outside of the developed world. Only in the developed world do we exceed our set points and then stay there. That is the problem we're trying to solve.
As a species, we have engineered ourselves a constant state of endless plenty
'Plenty' has nothing to do with it. Look at the table here. Chinese office workers in 1983 had the same amount of plenty (that is to say, the same amount of calories) as much heavier, fatter and taller Americans in 2016. The Americans should be eating way more, or the Chinese should weigh much more. They don't because the CO part of the equation is massively out of whack among the Americans.
In Britain, the last famine was in the 1840s. After that, the country had 'engineered plenty' and yet obesity was non-existent until the latter half of the 20th century, 3-4 generations later. If obesity is caused by having too much food, what took obesity so long?
which allows us to indulge in the incredibly silly idea that eating has nothing to do with weight loss
This is an uncharitable strawman of my position. I'm not arguing that somehow the calories in obese people are being obsorbed from the air, I'm arguing that CICO is a symptom of weight gain and not a cause. You seem to be equivocating between the two positions within the same paragraph, arguing on the one hand that CICO is an immutable law of physics, and on the other that obesity is caused by humans choosing to eat more food.
To avoid us talking past eachother any more, I'll ask you this directly:
Do you think it is possible for the average obese person to return to a healthy weight and stay there by consciously limiting their calories?
Crowstep
2mo ago
That answer is not even wrong.
The problem with using the CICO tautology as weight-loss advice is that an individual cannot control calories-out (if you exercise, the body will reduce your non-exercise caloric expenditure to compensate) and cannot control calories in either, at least over the long term. People eat because their appetites tell them to, and stop eating when their appetites tell them to stop.
Going outside of this is essentially impossible in the long term for 95% of the population, which is why Biggest Loser contestants, Minnesota Starvation Study subjects and prison weight gain study subjects returned back to their set-point eventually. This is also why the entire developed world is getting fatter. We're not deciding to eat more collectively, it's that something is messing with our lipostats. I personally think it's vegetable oil, but I wouldn't be too shocked if it was microplastics, xenoestrogens or some other environmental stressor.
CICO is either one of two things:
- A tautology that is axiomatically true
- A weight loss protocol that can be tested
If it's 1 then there's no point even discussing it, tautologies cannot be wrong, by definition. If it's 2, then we can test it. We have done so, and it has failed those tests completely.
What we usually see with CICO advocates is the fallacy that this site is named after. The bailey is telling fat people 'just to eat less', the motte is retreating to the tautology when someone points that that calorie-restricting diets don't actually work.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I wasn't making a claim about the detail of the theory, merely pointing out that some version of it is the consensus among nutrition researchers, as opposed to the 'fat people decided to get fat by eating lots of food and can get skinny again by deciding to stop' which is popular among laymen.
Crowstep
2mo ago
This was the part I was referencing:
But there's a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.).
Crowstep
2mo ago
This study suggests that in 2011, about 31% of white men working in 'computing and mathematics' were obese, which is actually higher than the obesity rate for white men overall (28%).
But that's missing the point that it isn't just individual groups of people getting fat, it's the entire developed world. Look at a list of the fattest countries, does this look like a list of laziest to most disciplined countries? Are the Italians really skinny because they work harder than Chileans or Finns?
One metric that does vary massively is the proportion of the diet that consists of processed food, which is another name for food that is full of vegetable oil.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I think our positions are pretty close, although I'd be more specific. After all, tasty food existed before the mid-20th century, and any food is 'fattening' tautologically if eating it leads to obesity. People in the past ate vast amounts of calories, but their bodies handled it. Even processed food existed for hundreds of years before the obesity epidemic.
What distinguishes the modern western diet is vegetable oil. All the data on 'processed' or 'junk' food is really just looking at foods with lots of vegetable oils. Consider a big mac meal with a shake from McDonalds. There is nothing modern about minced beef, bread or pickles, nor about fried potatoes, milk or sugar. What defines it as fast food the fact that everything is fried in, or contains vegetable oils. The same is true of essentially all processed food.
The fact that vegetable oil turned up at the exact time that the obesity epidemic kicked off makes it the most plausible candidate in my mind.
Crowstep
2mo ago
It may well be embraced by fat acceptance activists, but it is also embraced by most of the field of nutrition science.
CICO, meanwhile, is only popular with laymen (who very often pair it with moral condemnation of fat people).
I don't think it's possible to look at a chart like this and conclude that what's really going on is a linear increase in laziness starting in the mid-C20th for no reason. Pick any profession full of intelligent, hardworking people (medicine, law, programming, high-level business) and you'll see similar proportions of fat people to the general population. While there are entire premodern cultures where nobody is fat at all.
CICO feels better than set-point theory in the same way that complaining about greedy landlords feels better than campaigning for YIMBY zoning reform. Most people will choose righteous outrage over real explanations if given the choice.
Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?
Looks like it's been more or less flat since 2016. There was also a massive decline from 2004 to 2008, followed by a smaller decline between 2008 and 2016.
Although this survey suggests that (in America) it's more popular among young people, and that older men are particularly likely to reject it (maybe they think it's girly?). So I guess that does support your suggestion that it's having a moment among young women.
My guess is that what with all the 70s fashion (moustaches, flares, long skirts) this was only a matter of time.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Well the way to increase earnings is to get a better paying job or a promotion, there's a whole ecosystem of advice on how to do that.
If you focus more on the 'least effort' part then the answer is usually to put your money in a low-fee stocks & shares index fund, like Vanguard.
The third part, which admittedly wasn't part of your question, is to spend less money. That way you have more to invest or pay off debts.
Can you give us any information about your personal circumstances, goals, abilities etc?
I do agree that I don't expect this to change the world drastically. Most babies will continue to be born the old-fashioned way.
But you're assuming that this technology doesn't change the kind, or number of parents that get IVF. Think about tiger parents who send their three year old children to pre-MBA programmes. Do you think they wouldn't be willing to do something that actually makes a difference to their future children's outcomes? Even if it is only 2 IQ points, that's worth more than violin lessons or debate club.
Plus, we can reasonably expect the price to come down as more companies enter the space (there are already two that I know of). Soon enough, I expect the current 'doctor eyeballs the embryos to decide which one to implant' to be replaced with genetic testing in most IVF clinics. If you're already paying for the IVF, why not pay a little extra to give your future child a better chance in life?
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