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Notes -
I support embryo selection but I don't buy the argumentation Gwern puts forward in this footnote. People may be fine with rolling the dice naturally, but still take issue at monumental, population wide changes due to engineering.
"Yes, I'd love my kid to be selected from a better distribution, but I fear long-term effects if this policy is implemented at mass-scale because I am not a geneticist and it seems risky" is a perfectly consistent position.
The point of the argument in the footnote is to show that, once the "genetic engineering" boo lights are removed, everyone's revealed preferences favor the same outcome as the world in which we select embryos for higher intelligence, harmful comorbidities included (real or imagined). If people somehow think that rolling the dice with nature is less likely than embryo selection to unintentionally couple higher intelligence with undesirable traits, to the extent that it's preferable to accept "natural" outcomes orders of magnitude worse than their preferred outcome to mitigate the risks unique to embryo selection, they either have a dismally wrong understanding of embryo selection (which, reminder, is just rolling the dice a bunch and picking the best-looking result) or they're not reasoning consistently.
At its core, objecting to the reasoning of the geneticist with a shrug and an "I dunno man, sounds risky" isn't actually an argument about the risks (surely the geneticist has deeply considered them, and our objector is already on-record as lacking the qualifications to do so!) - it's an expression of distrust.
I suspect people's primary objection, regardless of whether they clearly understand and express it as such, has nothing to do with the long-term risk of embryo selection at a genetic level, and is instead based on the same obvious ethical and political concern for any eugenics proposal - that it will be applied unfairly by some groups to gain power over others. This includes geneticists and their employers miscalculating, misrepresenting, or lying about risks, evading liability for accidental harms or unsatisfactory outcomes, and charging enormous sums of money for extremely modest benefits; and rich parents granting their children an effortless comparative advantage over the majority of children whose parents don't (or can't) pony up to rig the game for themselves.
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