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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33535 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Would anyone with a brain initiate zero COVID, suffocate the country for three years, then cancel it overnight and overload the medical system?

China is observably not maximizing their odds of geostrategic dominance, nor much of anything else, sans ass-covering by party elites.

And before we start worrying about Choynese AGI, we should focus on something they've had much more of a head start in: Choynese Eugenics.

China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.

When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.

Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

Edge.org 2013: 2013 : WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

Geoffrey Miller, currently an AI decelerationist

How's it been going for the last decade?

China is not a competitor to the West. China will implement any braindead regulation the West devises, faster and harsher and stupider. China is less relevant than Turkey or, certainly, Israel. I will say it as many times as I have to.

So they couldn’t be doing both? I’m not sure they are, but given that they aren’t poised to impose stupid moratoriums on research as the west seems ready to (we’ve already banned eugenics). it’s seems that Americans and perhaps thx Atlantic countries will hobble themselves as decadent falling empires often do, and will reap the benefits of having an irrelevant moral high ground and watching as others overtake them.

This could be a western version of Haijin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin) in which we just decide to not move forward in science and technology. It’s never worked.

I agree, but with the catch that non-competitors can radically change for contingent reasons, get their shit together, and become competitors, sometimes. It'd be easy to say something similar about historical China's economy, and now they're top 2 nominal gdp.

It's historically normal for China to have the world's greatest GDP. USA is the weird one here.

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